SCHOOL JANITORS 
MOTHERS AND HEALTH 



PUTNA 




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Book 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



SCHOOL JANITORS 
MOTHERS AND HEALTH 



BY 
HELEN C. PUTNAM, A.B., M.D. 

OF THE COMMITTEE OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF MEDICINE 
ON THE TEACHING OF HYGIENE 



Health Habits educate 
more than Health Maxims 



AMERICAN ACADEMY OF MEDICINE PRESS 
EASTON, PA. 



t^ 



A-' 



l^ fi 



COPYRIGHT. 19!3. BY HELEN C. PUTNAM 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
PUBLISHT FEBRUARY. 1913 



©CI,A343421 



TO THE 

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR STUDY 

AND PREVENTION OF INFANT 

MORTALITY 



THE SUREST PREVENTION ON THE LARGEST SCALE 
IS TO DEVELOP THRU PUBLIC SCHOOLS POTENTIAL 
FATHERS AND MOTHERS WITH WHOLESOME BODIES, 
MINDS 'AND IDEALS 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

AUTHOR'S NOTE vii 

KEY-WORD ix 

I. PREVENTION OF SCHOOL FATIGUE 

October: The air school children breathe at 

home 11 

November: The air children breathe at school . 21 

December: Dirty children and fresh air . 27 
January : Internal cleanliness : carious teeth . » 32 
February: Internal cleanliness: elimination of 

waste 37 

March : What and when school children should 

eat 42 

April: Muscular exercise an internal bath . . % 48 

May: Idleness, evenings, dress, and cigarettes . 53 

June : The Long Vacation 58 

II. MOTHERS' CLUBS AND CLEAN SCHOOL- 

HOUSES 

November: Men as housekeepers ... 61 

December: Cleaning floors 67 

January : Cleaning lavatories — the common cup 

and towel — paper ones 75 

February: Walls and windows .... 85 

March: An interlude — open air schools . . 93 

April: Streets and housecleaning ... 96 

May: School housecleaning and social centers . 104 

III. SCHOOL JANITORS AND HEALTH 

October: A billion dollars and all our children . Ill 
V 



VI 



CONTENTS 



November: The great test. The Boston A. C. A 

December: And Janitors' Rules. 

January: And measuring window washing 

February: And "dipping" . 

March: Another study of schoolrooms 

April: Measuring health conditions . 

May: Dust again 

June: How to do it 



IV. PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF BIOLOGIC 
SCIENCE IN SCHOOL ADMINISTRA- 
TION: THE PROBLEM OF JANITOR 
SERVICE .... ... 

V. THE TRAINING OF JANITORS IN SANI- 
TARY CARE OF SCHOOL PREMISES . 

INDEX 



PAGE 

117 
124 
128 
134 
142 
151 
163 
167 



179 

189 
195 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

The main part of this Uttle book appeared 
during 1909-1912 as serials in Child-Welfare 
Magazine, the organ of the National Congress of 
Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations. They 
have been revised and several additions made 
for the purpose of increasing their usefulness; 
but the original mission is retained — a construc- 
tive appeal to organizations of mothers, the house- 
keepers, to fulfill their responsibihty for children's 
well-being outside the walls of the family residence 
as well as inside. The serial form of publication 
makes repetition occasionally desirable. Some of 
this has been retained with the hope that the 
emphasis of a repeated idea may help produce 
results. 

There are also two papers on related topics; 
one republisht from Proceedings of the National 
Education Association, the other from Journal of 
the American Public Health Association. 

I wish to record here my gratitude to Dr. 
Charles Mclntire, broad minded and generous 
secretary of the American Academy of Medicine 
which specializes in medical sociology, for his 
cooperation in issuing the volume. 

H. C. P. 
Quiapen 
January 1, 1913 



vn 



KEY-WORD 

School is a part of life, not "preparation" only, 
and to practice pupils in standardizing details 
affecting health means improving our vital sta- 
tistics — the measure of a nation's right living. 

Page 170 



IX 



PREVENTION OF SCHOOL 
FATIGUE 



The child's right to be well cared for equals " the right to 
be well born" 

October 

We have provided schools and required by 
law or social custom twenty million children to 
enter them this month. 

Nine months from now fifteen milUons, more 
or less, will show various degrees of nervousness 
and pallor. The condition will be accompanied 
in many instances with other disorders. 

This result of school hfe is called school fatigue. 
It is a hindrance in developing the best kind 
of citizens — either physically, or mentally and 
morally. It affects children's children, and is a 
factor in "race suicide" and race deterioration. 

It is produced partly by lack of proper air, 
food, play and sleep; partly by neglected physical 
defects; partly, too, by unwise school work and 
unwise home or other outside occupations. 
11 



12 PREVENTION OF 

Evidently parents, educators, school boards and 
other city fathers are concerned, as are state and 
federal authorities. Our best hope lies in intelli- 
gent mothers with the will and the power to use 
their intelligence. 

A mother can make no wiser plan for the coming 
nine months than to concentrate on preventing 
school fatigue in her own children; after them, 
in the children of the less fortunate, whose ill 
health reacts on her own either directly or in 
direct ways. Children need healthy playmates 
and school companions in a healthy community. 
Some of the work required can be successful only 
by combined effort of many mothers, of mothers 
and teachers, of both parents and school board; 
or other branches of the municipal government 
may need to cooperate. 



The air school children breathe at home 
We have nearly learned the lesson we must 
all eventually learn, that open air is essential to 
steady nerves and good health. We are proving 
daily that tuberculosis, nervous exhaustion (weari- 
ness, irritability, sleeplessness), most catarrhal 
conditions (of which we find so much among 
children), pneumonia, several contagious diseases 
and many surgical cases, all improve with "open 
air" treatment more satisfactorily — open air and 
a few other items of cleanliness. Even adenoid 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 13 

conditions are frequently found to disappear when 
city children are removed to open country living. 

The air that children have in schoolrooms 
is often such many medical inspectors, school 
nurses and teachers have told me that when they 
begin their duties in autumn they have irritated 
throats and other bad feehngs until they "get 
used to it." Children have this air for four, five 
or six hours daily. The mother must look first 
to "making up for it" so far as possible by the 
right conditions out of school; and next, to im- 
proving the air in schools. 

Odors of cooking, laundering, sleeping rooms 
and the like should be blown out. Whether or 
not there is any chemical harm in "smells," 
they are often accompanied with dust having its 
pus germs and occasionally, especially in dwellings, 
disease bacteria. Probably smells offend good 
taste because race experience has found them very 
often an index of disease and unhygienic condi- 
tions, filth-bred insects, mildew and stagnation. 
Offensive odors may even produce nausea. The 
mental depression and irritation from them dis- 
turbs health as well. They always mean that the 
house is not properly ventilated. 

Dust, too high temperatures and dryness are 
the commonest faults in indoor air at home. 
A fourth fault is something we have no good name 
for — a lack of "tone" or "vitality" or stimulus, 
some unknown quality or qualities that refresh 



14 PREVENTION OF ^ 

and "wake us up" when we throw open windows 
and draw long breaths of outdoor air. On cold 
winter days when sometimes the heat "doesn't 
heat," by opening the house for a minute's swift 
flushing with outside air we find ourselves warmer 
and entirely comfortable soon after. 

Some have offered in explanation of this de- 
lightful quality of open air that it is due to 
oxygen in larger quantities, or to ozone. Others 
claim an influence from radium, the interesting 
discovery for which Madame Curie has received 
the Nobel Prize. Radium exhibits a remarkable 
energy affecting objects in its vicinity, and the 
question is whether this influence from minute 
particles in the earth may not give to outdoor 
air some of its wholesome qualities; and whether 
there are not still other substances or forces, 
perhaps electric, as yet unknown that may do 
so. We have often thought a scientific problem 
solved, and later found there was more to it. 

It is recently proved that a large part of the 
comfort in open air is due to its constant motion, 
much of which is cut off by the walls of the house. 
One of the attempts in ventilation now is to 
supply sufficient motion of the air for comfort and 
health, as well as sufficient humidity. Whatever 
the explanation (we shall come back to it again), 
there is very quickly a harmful difference between 
air shut up and air free, even when the room is as 
well dusted as possible and is not too warm. 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 15 

The three objects, then, for mothers to work 
for at home are house air as free as possible from 
dust, never above 68° in temperature, and frequently 
renewed from out of doors. In addition, and this 
is important, they should have evaporation of 
water, just short of steam on windows in cold 
weather, to provide the humidity that in open 
air helps soothe and heal irritated respiratory 
passages. Or they may wish to measure the 
humidity with a wet-dry bulb thermometer as we 
shall see later is coming to be done in schools. 

All the rooms in use should be kept at as near 
the same temperature as possible, for when the skin 
and the deUcate lining of nose and throat are 
warm and flusht in a room of 68°, the sudden 
cold of another room, when such a change is 
frequently made, disturbs the circulation and its 
control by the nervous system to such a degree 
that often catarrh, a slight cold, or even slight 
muscular rheumatism follows. 

Wise mothers are coming more and more to 
regulate rooms by thermometers, not by feelings. 
Feehngs are extremely unreliable. We have for 
a long time allowed nurses and mothers to guess 
at the temperature of babies' bottles and baths 
by putting the finger in the milk or elbow in the 
water. Some measurements with thermometers 
have recently been made of actual temperatures 
after nurses have done their best with "feelings," 
and not once did they agree. The temperature 



16 PREVENTION OF 

of babies' food is very important indeed. Even the 
cooling that goes on between the time the bottle 
is given the baby and the time he finishes it may 
make the difference between a well and an ill baby. 

The temperature of the rooms at home is just 
as important to school children. I went into the 
library last night where my httle sister had been 
quietly reading for an hour beside the light wood 
fire on the hearth to take off the first touch of 
October frostiness. "It is stifling here." "Why, 
I was just feeling shivery and wanting my scarf ! " 
The thermometer read seventy-six. That is a 
universal experience, and a common — perhaps the 
commonest source of "colds," paving the way 
to tuberculosis. Thermometers should be kept 
steadily between 65° and 68° — lower rather than 
higher. If there is any discomfort, remove it in 
other ways than by excessive heat. 

Wise mothers are coming also to have no 
carpets; to have, instead, rugs not too heavy for 
a woman to lift and to hang on a clothesline or 
rope, to be thoroly beaten free from dust and 
aired. For walls, floors and furnishings they are 
coming to use dust cloths that hold the dust 
instead of scattering it; to have windows and 
outside doors open while wiping it up so that as 
much as possible may blow out of the room. 
They are beginning to insist that architects shall 
not plan the fresh air box of the furnace to open 
on the dusty side of the house, perhaps the street 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 17 

or a corner receiving its dust directly. Some ask 
" Why not two air boxes, so that we can close the 
dusty side on windy days?" They are keeping 
the hot air pipes from the furnace free from 
dust and the lining of the furnace in perfect re- 
pair so that gas and dust cannot escape into the 
rooms, and closing registers when ashes are be- 
ing disturbed in the furnace below. They have 
fewer ornaments, heavy window draperies, por- 
tieres and upholstered furnishings, all being dust 
promoters. 



Ideal sleeping room 

The most generous provision of good air can 
be in the sleeping room, where the school child 
spends nine hours every day. Here is the ideal 
during the coming nine months, below the latitude 
of Albany, and even above for hardy children; 
sleeping room — not dressing room. 

Choose a small corner room with two windows, 
one toward the south, both over grass and trees, 
not over the street; literally nothing but the bed 
in the room, or two or three single beds for others; 
nothing on the floor and walls, no draperies at 
the windows, unless a plain holland shade "for 
looks" in the daytime; one sash in each window 
always open its full extent day and night, the 
fly screens in to keep out snow or rain; if a storm 
makes it necessary the blinds may be closed, 
2 



18 PREVENTION OF 

but not the window. There may be a very few 
days when on account of blowing dust or intense 
cold one of the two windows should be closed, 
but the southern sash should never be; in fact, 
both southern sashes could be taken out alto- 
gether, and usually are, the screen being made to 
fill the whole window. 

Place the bed out of direct drafts, with head 
against an inner wall; furnish it with a hair 
mattress, cotton or outing flannel or woolen 
sheets, according to the weather, being sure that 
the mattress is warm enough or has an extra 
warm pad over it so that no possible chill can be 
felt from underneath; use woolen blankets, or 
for very cold weather a down puff which gives 
warmth without so much weight. The weight 
of many covers may cause the sleeper to awake 
feeling tired instead of rested. The covers dur- 
ing daytime should be kept folded over the foot 
of the bed, leaving it open to air and sunshine. 
In very cold weather one or two hot soapstones 
or hot flatirons (better than water bottles) wrapt 
in woolen (a bag is convenient) should be placed 
in the middle and bottom of the bed before bed- 
time. If in woolen they will keep warm all 
night. 

The child should wear pajamas covering the 
feet, of outing flannel, or woolen in the coldest 
weather, with a cotton or flannel cap or hood 
coming over the forehead in the very coldest 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 19 

weather, its cape extending down the back to 
the shoulders. Sleeping bags are usually not 
liked, altho travellers in northern lands cannot 
get along without them, and I will not describe 
them here. 

This is ideal because it is genuine outdoor air 
for nine in twenty-four hours. An upper piazza 
would be quite as good or better, with screens 
to cut off winds, and ingenuity and good sense in 
using it. 

Such sleeping will result in appetites for 
breakfast, much less susceptibility to "colds" 
thruout the winter, brighter color and steadier 
nerves next June, and the love of cleanliness 
that only habits of cleanliness can create. When 
mothers sympathize understandingly with this 
ideal (I know several who have realized it) they 
will find ways to overcome difficulties until something 
for their children results nearer it than exists at 
present for those fifteen millions about whom we 
are thinking. 



Basement 

One more place in a home that may make it 
unwholesome, no matter how well the foregoing 
points are attended to, is the cellar. The air 
of the basement penetrates the whole house, 
either between partitions not closed at the bot- 
tom, or thru cracks in floors and around doors, 



20 PREVENTION OF 

or thru imperfect furnace flues or cold air cham- 
bers. It must be kept sweet and sanitary by 
whitewashings, ventilating thru open windows, 
and positively refusing to allow odors of any kind 
in it. 



Mothers' clubs 

With the determination to bring to pass an 
intelligent ideal great improvements are possible; 
but finally we come to the hard fact that many 
houses and streets make wholesome air impossible. 
This is the point where motherhood itself drives 
women out of their private homes into combina- 
tions of efforts for better enforcement of better 
laws for the sake of the children. The mother 
who has done wisely for her own must, even still 
for the sake of her own, help other mothers' chil- 
dren. In schools so full as ours the unhealthy 
child influences the healthy in many ways. 

It is not possible here to say all that needs say- 
ing concerning the importance of outdoor air for 
children, and the harmfulness of the ordinary 
over-heated house air. So much — so very much 
depends on convincing mothers of this, that mothers' 
clubs in every city would be doing a public 
service this autumn if they would provide two 
or three open discussions on the subject. A 
speaker who has an up-to-date scientific training 
can make it very impressive and interesting. 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 21 

November 

The air children breathe at school 

To keep the air in schooLhouses healthful is 
a more difficult problem. Like the air at home, 
it must be between 65° and 68°, comparatively 
free from dust and frequently renewed from out 
of doors. 

How to clear away the material thrown into 
the air from so many bodies in rooms not pro- 
portionally as large as the rooms at home is 
one problem to solve. Another is how to keep 
floors, walls and furnishings free from dirt brought 
in on shoes and clothing, and created by the use 
of chalk and in some other ways. 

Until intelligent women are on school com- 
mittees concerned with school cleanliness the 
present conditions are likely to show little im- 
provement. What they are is indicated not only 
by the statements last month, but by statistics 
in the Census showing that the average death 
rate from tuberculosis among teachers is con- 
siderably higher than the average death rate 
from tuberculosis in all occupations. The Cen- 
sus also gives figures showing that tuberculosis 
among children increases all thru school years. 
There is one kind of public school where this 
is not true. The statistics of open air schools 
show that it not only does not increase, but is 
actually prevented when feared, and cured in 
children where it is known to have begun. The , 



22 PREVENTION OF 

very first duty for mothers is to help bring 
the present health record of public schools up 
to the level of the record of open air schools. 
It is very largely a matter of good housekeeping 
which is their field. 

Mothers in unofficial capacities can do some 
things to bring about better conditions. By 
visiting schools in one's own city and making 
written memoranda of special details (I shall tell 
later just how certain women have done it admira- 
bly), a collection of facts can be secured that will 
be useful, supplemented by our vital statistics, 
in pressing a public demand for improvement in 
common housekeeping in schools. 

The Republicans or the Democrats, whichever 
party controls the schools, will of course object 
at first. They will say that things are all right 
as they are, and this can be disproved promptly 
by the vital statistics and local details gathered. 
Next they will urge that there is no money, and 
tabs will have to be kept on their spendings. 
It will almost always be easy to prove plenty of 
money, but that it is misspent on objects much 
less important than the health of potential 
fathers and mothers. 



Dust and odors 

Is the floor clean.? Janitors and school men's 
standards of cleanliness are not those of the 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 23 

careful housewife for her bare floors. I have 
heard of a club of women who obtained permission 
to keep one school building clean. It became 
an object lesson of another complexion and odor; 
but the women had to continue the work in 
order to continue the improvement. 

Is the dust removed after the "dustless method" 
necessary at home? If not, it is imperative to 
bring it about promptly. This means vigorous 
and faithful effort until feather dusters are re- 
placed by cloths used so as not to scatter the 
dust, with open windows allowing as much as 
possible to blow out, and certainly not within one 
hour before the assembling of pupils. I know 
a university man who led a movement to have 
little girls come to school early in the morning, 
poor things, to dust the school room in order to 
"teach them hygiene"! Another formed street 
cleaning clubs to pick up the dirty papers and 
put them in boxes ! ! 

Are cloakrooms ventilated out of doors, not 
into schoolrooms? Is the basement clean and 
fresh smelling in all its divisions? If not, it must 
be kept so equally with the basement of the good 
housewife. Are the water-closets, both boys' and 
girls', as clean and fresh as those in healthful 
homes? Odors of disinfectants must not be ac- 
cepted as proof of cleanliness. They merely dis- 
guise other odors, like perfumery. Cleanliness has 
no odor. I know an expensive normal school 



24 PREVENTION OF 

that greets its visitors with the smell of a certain 
patented cleansing fluid used in wiping the floors, 
training teachers of the future in this standard 
for fresh air. Normal schools should not be neg- 
lected in the visiting. 

Perhaps a school will be found with basement 
playrooms. I have never seen one that was 
not extremely dusty, especially the floor — which 
means the air. They are avowedly intended for 
rainy days; but are very frequently used for any 
days or merely misty and damp ones, with or 
without the knowledge of teachers. There are 
some schools that have no outdoor recesses. 
Parents should keep their children away from 
these schools, secure mothers' and all other clubs 
possible to appeal to school authorities, write 
to the papers, hold public meetings, and persist 
until outdoor recesses are establisht. Roofs 
are sometimes fitted up for playgrounds, neigh- 
boring vacant lots rented or loaned. As a last 
resort, abandon the school entirely, and build 
one somewhere else in the midst of a five acre lot, 
where school gardens, playgrounds, green grass 
and trees, can restore to children some of their 
rights; then furnish free transportation, by street 
cars or school omnibus, as private schools and 
rural communities are doing. We occupy but a 
very small fraction of our great territory. It is 
not necessity, it is neglect and indifference that 
is depriving children of mother nature's whole- 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 25 

some, healing, inspiring face — crowding them off 
the surface of the earth rather too Hterally. See 
mortahty statistics, Bureau of the Census. 



Chalk and ventilating systems 

Chalk dust can best be prevented by not using 
chalk. If that cannot be at once brought about, 
moist wipers must be used and not allowed when 
dry to scatter dust. Dry chalk erasers are as 
necessary to do away with as feather dusters. 

Perhaps in the visiting a school will be found 
with a system of ventilation that does not allow 
windows to be opened. One should notice how 
the air compares with outside air; should learn 
how teachers and others like it after long hours 
in it; how the "system" is run. If its right 
working depends on the attention of some person, 
one may be assured from the experiences of very 
many people that the fallibility in all personal 
service extends to this ventilating system, and 
the children are helpless victims. The Key -word 
of this little book shows the way out. Almost 
all heating systems have not only air supply 
from out of doors, but also can connect with base- 
ment air when wanted. At night the open air 
in-take is shut off and basement air is sent to 
rooms instead, because less fuel is required to 
heat it. No one knows just how often on "cold" 
(how cold.'') days, or when fire or fuel is low, 



26 PREVENTION OF 

basement air is sent up to the rooms. It belongs 
to a sanitarian to decide, or to an intelligent care- 
taker of children. The practice of warming the 
rooms with basement air out of school hours 
helps explain why buildings unused so many hours 
out of the twenty -four and out of the week smell 
so stale. They need fresh air almost as much as 
children's lungs. 

We have been drifting into artificiality, into 
"just-as-good" ideals, and only lately are coming 
to realize we cannot be a healthy people until we 
get back to clean air, clean water, clean foods, 
bodies and lives — the simple life. I am not sure 
that any "system" is preferable to direct open 
air in school. We are all sure that open country 
air is best for children. The conclusion is too 
obvious to state. Mothers' clubs must help 
study out ways and means — study out, not guess 
out. 



And janitors 

Has the janitor passed a civil service examina- 
tion in school sanitation? Possibly he has taken 
an examination, but if it is found, on looking 
over the questions, that they relate to running 
the heating apparatus chiefly, or do not include 
questions testing substantial understanding of 
"cleaning house," there is a place to begin im- 
provements. Neither superintendent nor jani- 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 27 

tor can keep school air fresh with good intentions; 
they must know and use the proper methods for 
doing so. 

Mothers' clubs may find it necessary to estab- 
lish classes for training janitors in housewifery. 
Their salaries rival or exceed the salaries of teach- 
ers who are required to have extensive preparation 
for no more important service in kindergarten, 
primary and other grades. Clubs will better 
understand needs and ways of helping if they will 
compare their facts and ideas with school physi- 
cian and school nurse in heart-to-heart talks; 
but even these officials must be kept up to the 
cherishing ideals of motherhood. Mothers can- 
not shirk their responsibilities on "paid workers" 
if the human race is to attain its best. 

It probably occurs to some readers, I hope it 
does, that in this matter of housecleaning in 
public schools much better than a man might 
be a woman as superintendent of such work; not 
any good woman, but one who is either a graduate 
in nursing or in home economics, with a scientific 
conscience and technical training in sanitation. 



December 

Dirty children and fresh air 
Unclean bodies and clothing contribute as 
much to school fatigue as an unclean house, both 



28 PREVENTION OF 

at home and at school. They produce physical 
ailments and mental lassitude in two ways: 
by befouling the air that all in the room must 
breathe, and by depressing the child's own 
vitality through lack of a needed nerve tonic — 
the right sort of bath. 

If some chemical were poured over the human 
body that would destroy all of it except the 
nervous system, we would have remaining an 
almost perfect model of it, a lacelike structure, 
apparently made of innumerable white threads 
running into larger and larger cords and finally 
to the brain. So closely alongside each other do 
the finest white threads start from the skin on 
their way to the brain that in many places a pin 
point can hardly be past between them. These 
nerves are like telegraph wires carrying news to 
the brain and messages back. 

The best part of bathing is its effect on nerves 
and brain. More people need to appreciate that 
the right kind of bath is an ideal tonic. The 
warm bath with soap removes dirt and perspira- 
tion (waste poured out of the body on the skin), 
and the rubbing over these thousands of nerve 
endings in the skin sends messages along them, 
resulting in dilating blood vessels in the skin, 
making it warmer and withdrawing this blood 
from other parts. It draws some of it from the 
brain leaving the brain in a better condition for 
sleep than work. Brain like muscle must have 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 29 

an extra supply of blood when it works. There- 
fore this is the kind of bath to take before sleep. 

But when energy is wanted, whether of brain 
or body, cold on these nerve endings is the stimu- 
lus to apply, cold that is cold enough to make a 
little gasp for breath as it flashes over face, chest 
and neck, and down the back. This is the 
"tonic" to be taken in the morning before the 
day's work. 

The "cold tonic" is not for cleanliness, but for 
vigor. It clears the brain and body of the last 
remnants of sleep, helps cure cold feet and 
improves the circulation in other ways, steadies 
nerves, and is, Uke open windows at night, a fine 
appetizer. It should be taken in a warm room 
(70° to 75°). If "the bathroom cannot be made 
warm so early in the morning" by furnace heat, 
use a gas radiator for ten minutes. It makes the 
air bad; but the value of the tonic exceeds the 
harm done in only ten minutes. 

The tonic bath need not exceed one minute. 
A warm bath in the morning should always be 
followed by the cold dash on face, chest and 
especially on the back. When accustomed to it 
one's body cries out for it as it calls for water when 
thirsty. The tonic may be taken without the 
warm bath, of course. When the child is not 
accustomed to it, begin by a dash of cold water 
over face and chest while standing in the tub. 
Dry at once, rubbing warm; next day try a 



30 PREVENTION OF 

quart, dasht over face and chest and down the 
back along the spine. This should be as cold as 
the faucet will give. If the child does not like 
it persevere in this without increasing for a while. 
As soon as a dash of cold water all over can be 
taken, the "morning tonic" — the best one in the 
world — is assured. 

If there is not time for this morning dash and 
rub before school the remedy is to retire earlier 
at night and get up earlier in the morning. It 
is not to omit the tonic. The child's vigor is worth 
it. 

Children's clothing absorbs odors from their 
bodies and from rooms, especially odors of cook- 
ing and tobacco. Entirely different clothing 
should be used for sleeping, especially the under- 
vest; and all the day clothing should be spread 
out on a line or on chairs in the open air sleeping 
room for ventilation. In the morning it should 
be entirely free from odors, and can be warmed 
while the bath is going on. A very considerable 
part of the offensive odors in all schools comes 
from unclean clothing. 

Mothers having taken these measures for 
conserving strength and happiness in their 
dearest must next seek methods for helping those 
less cared for, whose neglect is befouling school- 
room air. Clubs can help greatly by learning 
how school baths and other city baths are provided 
in some places, and popularizing the idea at home. 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 31 

The very best thing for a school is to have a 
swimming tank, its own or a suitable one else- 
where. Sometimes a swimming tank has been 
presented as a memorial to a pupil or instructor. 
A mothers' club might do this in the name of 
one whom it wisht to honor. Here cleanliness, 
a tonic, and the art by which one's own life and the 
lives of others may be preserved from death by 
drowning are secured all in one, together with an 
ideal physical exercise ("gymnastics") for devel- 
oping heart and lungs. The better heart and 
lungs in a child, the less school fatigue and the 
longer life is assured. Many English schools 
have swimming, as ours ought to have. 

In looking further into this subject mothers will 
find very useful information in Public Baths in the 
United States, by G. W. W. Hanger, Bulletin of 
the Bureau of Labor, No. 54, September, 1904. 
It is a part of the exhibit of the Bureau at the 
Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Possibly it is 
one of the Government publications that is for 
free distribution. Address the Government Print- 
ing Office at Washington. There is also an 
interesting English book. Modern Baths and 
Bath Houses, by W. Paul Gerhard, C. E., pub- 
lisht in 1908. Brookline, Massachusetts, has 
one of the best public baths for children and 
others. It is described in American Public 
Health Association Journal, 1897. There are also 
many other recent reports on batha for schools 



32 PREVENTION OF 

which can be found by consulting the librarian 
at the public library. It would be a great 
mistake to do anything without reading up on the 
matter, for there are many "new ideas," as, for 
example, that bathtubs should not be provided, 
because they are not kept clean. Instead, spray, or 
"rain," or "needle" baths are best where the 
spray comes from the side, not from above — wet- 
ting the hair. The best of all, however, is a swim- 
ming pool. 

The justification for clubs in these strenuous 
days is performance as well as papers. Where 
one has helpt provide a swimming tank for boys 
and girls all the seasons thru, there will be more 
of health, morals, life and joy in that community 
thereafter. 



January 

Internal cleanliness: carious teeth 

Probably more than ninety out of every hundred 
children have decaying teeth. This means offen- 
sive breath, increasing the bad air of school 
rooms. 

It means much more to the children having 
them, and is one of the most serious as well as 
common causes of school fatigue and various 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 33 

forms of ill health. The decaying spots are 
nests of decomposing food and disease producing 
bacteria. These and bacterial toxins (poisons) 
swallowed undermine the general health, and 
cause other troubles about the throat and nose. 
The poisons spread from teeth to neighboring 
glands and openings, causing earache, enlarged 
glands, catarrh, as well as tender gums and 
"toothache." The poisonous condition of the 
mouth aggravates the results of scarlet fever or 
any other illness, and increases the danger of ear 
complications. 

Swallowing these virulent poisons impairs 
digestion, and anemia ^s almost always found with 
carious teeth. Nutrition being poor from indiges- 
tion, even if good food is given, tuberculosis and 
other diseases find an easier victim. The pain 
of chewing food when the mouth is uncomfortable 
causes children to swallow without chewing as 
they ought, thus increasing indigestion and form- 
ing a bad habit for life. 

In these ways physical growth is impaired, the 
nervous system becomes more irritable, mental 
development is hindered. Just as good care 
should be taken of the first teeth as of the per- 
manent ones, not only for the sake of the general 
health, but because their condition affects the 
development of the jaw and of the permanent 
teeth coming in the same places. 



34 PREVENTION OF 

Causes of carious teeth 

When the health of the mother is poor before 
the child is born, or if syphilis is inherited, or 
if the health of the child is poor, poor teeth 
usually result. Poor teeth are also the result of 
neglect to clean away food particles before they 
begin to decompose. Certain substances, espe- 
cially acids, injure the teeth; also ice water and 
very hot fluids. These same very hot and very 
cold temperatures injure the stomach as well. 

Lack of exercise is bad for the teeth, the exer- 
cise of chewing hard food. The hard particles 
polish the teeth, and the firm pressure in chewing 
develops the jaws, increasing circulation to the 
roots of the teeth, by which their nutrition is 
improved. When teeth do not meet properly 
indigestion sometimes results from insufficient 
mastication and the teeth will decay more easily. 
It is probably because the jaws are not developt 
as they should be, and such children should be 
taken to a good dentist who can alter the condi- 
tion when the child is young, greatly to the 
advantage of both health and looks. 



Prevention 

Children must form the habit of using their 
toothbrushes and quill toothpicks in the privacy 
of their own rooms; the splinters that break from 
wooden toothpicks make them less desirable. 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 35 

If mothers themselves are really in earnest and 
convinced of the importance of saving the teeth, 
they can make their children so. Otherwise 
nothing in a magazine or book can do it. The 
children must suffer the consequences. Mothers' 
clubs have a responsibility for creating this 
intelligence thruout their communities. 

In these days of breakfast foods and other 
prepared foods too little real chewing is done. 
Pains should be taken to provide some hard and 
tough food, and to insist on its being chewed 
until in a fluid state when it "swallows itself." 
This is not easy when the habit of "bolting" 
food and drink is establisht; but it is worth 
much effort, for a good digestion is one of the 
best preventives of intemperance and other 
manifestations of ill health. Perseverance pays 
in this. I know a mother who never gives her 
children anything to eat between meals unless 
they are hungry enough to eat a crust — ^for the 
teeth's sake. 

School dentists should be in every school 
quite as much as medical inspectors. The 
dentist will have even more work to do, since 
hardly three in a hundred mouths do not need 
attention. For several years they have been 
appointed in Germany; also in England and other 
European countries more recently. We are 
later in taking it up; but have begun to appoint 
them, and each year their number is greater. 



36 PREVENTION OF 

Many schools where there is none stand waiting 
for the impulse from mothers' clubs which could 
render few great services so easily. An open 
meeting with a talk by an efficient dentist, and 
physician or school inspector, followed up later 
by a little tactful pushing can hardly fail to get 
dental school inspection establisht, with provision 
for children too poor to have the necessary work 
done, just as children's eyes are cared for when 
parents cannot to it. Teachers must be informed 
and interested, as their cooperation is of the 
greatest value. No child can do its best with a 
septic mouth, and it is wholly worth while for 
society to save itself from poor citizens by pre- 
venting their development. 

If toothbrushes are not a success at home, in 
some schools a rack and brush bearing the same 
number are given the child, and he is required 
to use the brush in the morning and at noon. 
Bu,t this is a pity; cannot the visiting nurse 
bring it about at home? It is most important to 
clean the teeth thoroly at bedtime. One simple 
help in keeping the mouth as it should be is the 
habit of drinking a little water at the end of the 
meal. The last word given out by nose and throat 
specialists of which I have heard is that probably 
very many more of our illnesses come from bad 
mouths and teeth than we have thus far known. 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 37 

February 

Internal cleanliness: elimination of waste 

The waste in the large intestine, after the 
nourishing parts of food have been absorbed into 
the body thru the walls of stomach and small 
intestine, is sometimes compared to the ashes, 
vapor and gases given off by a steam engine 
using coal and water for "food" to supply its 
working power. In the body other waste also 
results from using up parts of itself in muscular 
and mental work; a portion of the food eaten 
goes to restoring these parts. 

Unless the waste is cleared away it "clogs the 
system," doing harm by pressure of the mass of 
waste on surrounding parts, or by acting as a slow 
poison. In these and other ways constipation 
becomes one of the common causes of school 
fatigue. The waste is eliminated chiefly thru 
the intestine, kidneys, lungs and skin. For the 
lungs and skin cool fresh air, water and exercise 
have been mentioned as essential to health. 
They are also essential in keeping kidneys and 
intestine in order. These are like all parts of the 
body under control of the nervous system; so 
that whatever helps maintain a healthy nervous 
system helps very much both kidneys and intestine 
in doing their work. 



38 PREVENTION OF 

Water, food and habit 

Pure water at the natural temperature, not 
iced, can hardly be drunk too freely if thirsted for, 
specially by a child who perspires considerably. 
It should, however, be taken between meals, not 
in large quantities with them, and should never 
be "bolted." 

Properly taken it "flushes out" the system, 
chiefly thru the kidneys; but also thru the 
intestine, as well as lungs and skin. One common 
cause of constipation is too dry feces, requiring 
straining at stool. A glass of water (in winter 
it may be hot if preferred) taken, a few swallows 
at a time, while dressing in the morning or while 
undressing at night, sometimes prevents constipa- 
tion. Three or four glasses more are needed 
during the day. A tablespoonful of wet flaxseed, 
taken at night, is an old fashioned and perfectly 
harmless way of "oiling" the intestinal tract, so 
that dry hard stools may slip along more easily. 

Fruits and nuts, the choice of which depends 
partly on the child, should be used freely. Prunes 
and figs, either cookt or eaten as confectionery, 
are well known helps. Apples are often good. 
Bananas, if ripe, are good; if not ripe they can be 
baked in the skin or peeled and baked with a 
sauce of sugar, lemon juice and butter. Many 
who cannot, or think they cannot use bananas, 
find the cookt banana excellent. It often agrees 
with very "difficult" stomachs. Fruits and 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 39 

vegetables help because of their salts and acids 
especially. A diet should be varied from day to 
day in preventing constipation that is obstinate. 
The use of molasses is also recommended. 

General suggestions such as these have a 
general value; but it must be remembered that 
each child has his own peculiarities that should 
be consulted in establishing the habit that is 
imperative — a daily evacuation of the bowels. 
One most important aid is a regular hour daily. 
Habit is one of the most interesting and perhaps 
unappreciated factors in living — habits of body, 
habits of acting, habits of thinking. The child 
trained to empty the bowel after breakfast has 
regularly at that hour the intestinal sensation 
impelling him to do so. If, however, he restrains 
this, the next day it is much less or gone. Usually 
after breakfast or at bedtime are the most con- 
venient hours and, therefore, the most regularly 
observed. In requiring this habit of regularity, 
as well as other right habits, mothers have 
nature's cooperation. 



Results of constipation 

It is a mistake to have the medicine habit for 
constipation. It is very unusual that suitable 
diet, water and exercise fail to secure the one 
daily evacuation necessary. No mother is for- 
givable for failing to establish this habit in her 



40 PREVENTION OF 

children, together with an appreciation of the 
"internal cleanliness" in which it is a factor. 
The child's habit of constipation cannot always 
be easily corrected in later life. It causes some- 
times local trouble, such as hemorrhoids, or 
fissures (cracks) in the anus that increase con- 
stipation because so painful, and other results 
even more serious. It is a cause of anemia, 
headache, mental dullness, irritabiUty, loss of 
appetite, with the coated tongue that makes an 
offensive breath and unclean mouth whose 
harmfulness we have learned. It is almost 
always found in girls who have painful menstrua- 
tion, or undevelopt or misplaced pelvic organs. 
The results, therefore, are liable to be so serious 
that when mothers cannot prevent constipation 
by their own efforts they should consult a physi- 
cian rather than allow the habit to go on, particu- 
larly between nine and sixteen years of age. 
We might more wisely say from infancy to six- 
teen; but the tendency to it is increast during 
school life by sitting positions and habits, so that 
special attention is called to it during these years. 
One of the sitting positions inviting constipa- 
tion and other ills is the very common habit of 
sitting on the lower part of the back instead of on 
buttocks and upper part of thighs. With the 
former wrong position, and sometimes even with 
the latter, children and others are often seen with 
chest dropt forward, so that between the crowding 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 41 

down from above and crowding up from below 
the abdominal and thoracic circulation is greatly 
impeded, digestive and other organs being squeezed 
out of place and shape. Corsets compressing 
laterally do no more harm, I fancy, than this 
vertical compression in the corsetless. It is 
restful, literally so, to sit and stand erect, and 
children trained to it become less easily fatigued. 
This does not mean that the backs of seats should 
not be used, but means that the spine should not 
be curved forward in using them. School seats 
with properly shaped backs are necessary. 

This is one of the reasons why mothers* clubs 
should urge changes in school curricula by which 
children can have more moving about during 
school hours; manual training rooms with work- 
benches, domestic science rooms with worktables, 
nature study (or botany, zoology, or biology) 
rooms with specimens to examine grown in the 
children's own school gardens or collected on 
country walks; "organized games," dancing and 
other physical exercise, not forgetting one of the 
most important, swimming. 

It is not necessary that school customs invite 
ill health. Books are not the only road to wisdom, 
possibly not even the best, as we have been assum- 
ing. 



42 PREVENTION OF 

March 

What and when school children should eat 

Important as are external and internal clean- 
liness in preventing school fatigue, nutrition is 
no less so. Each detail is so dependent on the 
others that when one is neglected all suffer. 

Many children are started wrong in the morn- 
ing. Perhaps because they slept in a room with 
closed windows, or because of bad teeth or con- 
stipation that "spoil" the mouth, or because they 
lack that "morning tonic" — for these or other 
reasons they have little appetite for breakfast. 
We have discust these points. 

Too often breakfast is a hurried snatch instead 
of being appetizingly served like the later meals. 
Many children go to school improperly bathed 
and fed because of late rising, probably due to 
late hours the night before. In some foreign 
cities and in some of our own schools open at 
eight o'clock or eight- thirty. Earlier hours 
both morning and night are better for children 
and for grown-ups. We live too much by artifi- 
cial light, and miss the exhilarating morning 
freshness. The question is when will more 
parents adopt more wholesome hours for the 
children's good, and more wholesome food when 
they set but one table, and furnish more whole- 
some examples in some other particulars. 

There is, too, the fact that for some a hearty 
meal as the first event of the day is not indicated. 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 43 

For these and other reasons very many go to 
school (as to other duties) without enough to 
sustain them until half past twelve or one o'clock. 
This is the cause of much "school fatigue," as 
well as of breaking down among office workers and 
others. 

Some public and many private schools serve 
a glass of milk or cocoa and a biscuit between 
half past ten and eleven o'clock. It is a pretty 
and a wise custom I have seen, to have the 
children before the lunch is brought in sit for 
two or three minutes with heads lying on the 
desks, resting peacefully. Certain children bring 
in the food on trays, giving to each a paper napkin 
for the desk and another for the hands. The 
children learn to serve and to eat daintily, the 
whole event not requiring more than six or 
seven minutes. Those who can afford to do so 
pay a few cents a week; but all have the food, 
no one knowing who does not pay. There are 
several ways of doing this. Wherever attempted, 
the resulting better work and vitality thru the 
year justify the plan. 

The noon luncheon is another item in prevent- 
ing school fatigue. Children often bring unsuit- 
able food from home and spend their pennies on 
poor stuff. It is said that a noon dinner for 
those who go home interferes with good work in 
the afternoon session. The mother sometimes 
is away at work and there is no suitable dinner at 



44 PREVENTION OF 

home. The custom of lunching at school is 
growing. Caterers who frequently serve the 
luncheon are not dietitians, and I have never 
seen any school lunches served by them that were 
as wholesome or as well served as certain ones 
served by mothers' clubs. They perhaps employ 
a business woman or man; but are themselves 
represented by two or three ladies present every 
day. The variety on a single day is much less 
than that of caterers; the fancy and "made 
dishes" fewer; but the variety from day to day 
is ample, and children are thoroly satisfied with 
the excellence and daintiness of the simpler menu. 
In some English schools and in a few of ours 
the domestic science classes prepare and serve 
the luncheons, or a portion of them. This may 
be done so as to be fine training for the pupils, 
and results encourage further experimenting. 
In other ways this problem of morning and noon 
lunches of better quality than that brought from 
home is being studied. Whoever undertakes 
it should have a definite understanding of ele- 
mentary principles of nutrition. This is not too 
difficult for mothers' clubs to set about acquiring. 
A competent instructor (very many are not so) 
can in a few lessons to a group make the subject 
clear enough for this purpose, or some may 
decide to give one whole year to the study of 
school lunches, while another group gives its 
attention to schoolhouse cleaning. In almost 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 45 

every organization there are members who wish 
to concentrate on some special studies and Hnes 
of effort. By encouraging and assisting them to 
do so valuable members are likely to be had and 
progressive usefulness secured. The club as a 
whole may continue its general programs which 
will be strengthened by occasional contributions 
from the special workers. All can concentrate 
on a common purpose when it has been developt. 

The United States Bureau of Education has 
recently issued Bulletin, 1909, No. 3, The Daily 
Meals of School Children by Caroline L. Hunt. 
It can be obtained on request by addressing the 
Bureau at Washington as above. The secretary 
of every club should include this in its circulating 
or reference library. Another help in providing 
the right foods for children, which can be had on 
application, is the Bulletins on Human Nutrition 
issued by the State College of Agriculture at 
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Address 
Dr. L. H. Bailey, Director. Also the department 
of home economics in every state agricultural 
college is always glad to assist mothers' clubs 
in their study of how to feed children, and it is 
a very good thing to keep in touch with this 
department. 

There is an article on "The School Luncheon" 
by Lucy A. Osborne, of the Worcester Trade 
School for Girls, in The Pedagogical Seminary, 
June, 1912, that will perhaps be most helpful. 



46 PREVENTION OF 

since it surveys the field quite thoroly, and also 
has a large number of references to the writings 
of others. This magazine should be in every 
public library for the use of mothers' clubs, for 
it contains the valuable studies concerning 
children made year by year at Clark University, 
or made outside by its graduates. 

No attempt is worth while here to enter into 
details of dietetics, for they need pages, time and 
discussion. In Miss Hunt's Bulletin, besides 
helpful and practical directions, a few good 
references will be found to other writings. There 
is almost no improvement in the curriculum of 
public schools that women can more becomingly 
urge than the teaching of domestic science, with 
the insistence on appointing a really competent 
instructor. Simple cookery and sewing in the 
upper grammar grades is needed; but in the 
high schools a very much larger outlook should 
be given, to include the family responsibilities 
and duties of home makers. Our high schools 
must turn out intelligent home makers before 
the prevention of school fatigue can be realized. 
Even then we shall have on hand the question 
what to do for the millions of young men and 
women between sixteen and twenty -five years of 
age, who dropt out of primary and grammar 
grades, are liable to become parents, and have 
only this childhood's education and information 
pickt up from newspapers, streets, companions 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 47 

and the like with which to bring up their chil- 
dren. 

Boys as well as girls become home makers, and 
their intelligence must be equally assured. I 
have found in various places boys in the grammar 
or lower grades learning to sew on buttons and do 
simple mending and darning, learning simple 
cookery for "when mother is sick," or for camp- 
ing. This is what all soldiers and sailors and 
ranchmen do, what George Junior Republic 
boys. Boy Scouts and many others do. Mothers 
should help public schools to supply instruction 
in this important need of boys, and should train 
their own to take care of themselves and their 
rooms and belongings after decent and sanitary 
fashion. In England I found boys and girls in 
classes studying about choosing the site, building 
the house, plumbing, ventilation and other 
details of home sanitation; pure food laws, 
detecting adulterations; disposal of waste, orderly 
premises, clean streets, all of which concern boys 
as much as girls. It raises the idea of home to 
have it of enough dignity and worth to study in 
school. 

The problem of school fatigue is most hope- 
fully undertaken thru this national instruction 
in home making, being mindful that all the con- 
cerns of the community and all the concerns of 
the home in this age are identical. 



48 PREVENTION OF 

April 

Muscular exercise an internal bath 

Physical exercise is a large factor in preventing 
school fatigue. 

I am writing by the open library window of a 
university overlooking the valley of the Monon- 
gahela and purple hills beyond, where the first 
spring thunder shower is circling. On the campus 
to the left is an imposing gymnasium with baths 
and all the other up-to-date features, such as 
physical examinations, a generous athletic field, 
and an expert to guide their use wisely. 

The students, only one out of a hundred in the 
public schools, young men and women, are having 
this care of their health for the first time, after 
ten or twelve years of "laying foundations" 
without it. It is well within the truth to say that 
they would average three years better in capacity 
for citizenship if the elementary schools had 
attended to their personal habits, play and formal 
exercise and physical defects. It is certainly 
beginning at the wrong end. But it is in line 
with the history of our schools which have been 
developt with the idea that college and university 
is thei'r objective. What of the ninety-nine in 
each hundred who do not go to college? We are 
only recently seeing — with a still limited vision — 
that public schools would better train in right 
living than for college. 

A few days ago I was in a rather famous 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 49 

elementary school, famous because part of a 
great institution that turns out teachers. I saw 
several classes in gymnastics, and this was the 
way of it: They exercised in a square entrance 
hall into which dust was trackt from the streets 
of this "soft coal city" by thousands of feet daily. 
The windows up the stairway were closed (they 
had a system of heating and ventilating forbidding 
opening windows); the thermometer registered 
70°-74°. After a class had roUickt with open 
mouths thru some very lively gyrations my own 
face and throat were parcht with dust and heat 
and foul air; the pupils' faces were red, bodies 
perspiring and odorous, and there was coughing 
on all sides to clear the throats. Laughter and 
breathlessness and the beautiful elasticity after 
abuse of which childhood has so much (or what 
would we come to!) covered the sins of omission 
and commission in the teachers' eyes, and one 
said to me, "Can anyone say that this ought not to 
be in the pubUc schools!" With much restraint 
I rephed, "Yes. It ought not. It ought to be 
out in that concreted yard this glorious day." 
He saw the point partly perhaps, but the inflexible 
monster, "system," mechanical, shortsighted, is 
doubtless grinding along to-day in that entrance 
hall, as it has thru the years, sending out teachers 
by the thousand with standards accordingly. 

If mothers thru their clubs would throw their 
energy into the growing demand for as wholesome 
4 



50 PREVENTION OF 

or more wholesome environment for the little 
children of the nation as for the big ones, we 
would "arrive" much sooner. 

To fit a few of the children for college schools 
have exercised all children by chiefly the "tiny 
eye and tongue and pen wagging muscles," with 
body in a stooping position that compresses heart, 
lungs, digestive and pelvic organs. This period 
of most rapid growth should make sure of the full 
development of these vital organs, and of the 
nervous system, which determine length and 
usefulness of life; and of the reproductive organs 
also, whose development depends largely on a free 
circulation. Vigorous circulation requires a 
strong heart, which comes by exercise of the heart 
muscle, as other muscles are strengthened by 
exercise. Heart and lungs are physiologically 
one; the development of one means both. It is 
exercise of large muscles, those of the back, legs, 
arms, that most increases pulse and respiration 
(heart and lung action), fitting them for the 
sudden and long continued strains of life. Parents 
need to remember that good hearts, lungs, 
digestive, reproductive and nervous systems are 
the most important aims of exercise; and that 
reasonably energetic use of the large muscles in 
cool fresh air is the way to accomplish it. By this 
we acquire the vigor underlying mental and 
physical work, lack of which is quite as often the 
cause of incapacity and failure as is lack of 
knowledge. 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 51 

Exercise drives the blood and lymph more 
strongly thru every "nook and cranny," using 
up "fuel" stored so long it needs to be used to 
make way for fresher, sweeping away waste more 
thoroly, and bringing to all parts abundance of 
food and oxygen. This is another kind of "bath," 
another method of securing "internal cleanliness." 
These "toxins" and wastes that are removed are 
not only a cause of feeling tired (poisoned), but 
are often a cause of "the blues," of feeling dis- 
couraged, "cross," incapable. 

To prevent school fatigue, or to drive it away by 
exercise, another thing is necessary — the play 
spirit. Just as gymnastics in hot foul air are 
bad, so gymnastics not enjoyed, "a bore," fail 
to accomplish all they might. Therefore, play- 
grounds, and rhythmic, artistic or historic games 
and dances are supplementing gymnasia and 
replacing formal drill. Remembering the poor 
gymnastics usually seen in ordinary schools, 
parents will probably "err on the right side" 
if they urge instead playgrounds and capable 
supervision. A combination of both excellent 
gymnastics and delightful play, including dancing, 
is best; and I have seen it — but only very rarely. 
Gymnastics, when weather permits, should be 
in the playgrounds; mothers who understand the 
need of open air can help persuade officials of this. 
Competition in running, jumping, dancing or other 
exercise that leaves the child exhausted at the 



52 PREVENTION OF 

day's end, or the next day, is not a help in pre- 
venting school fatigue, and is as unwise as not 
enough exercise. 

Parents should visit schools during exercise 
time; and if the atmosphere has not the open 
air freshness, accept no excuse that is not weigh- 
tier than health itself. Many "best we can 
do's" are not true. It is rather official lack of 
intelligence or conscience ("high up" possibly), 
resourcefulness, willingness, in adapting condi- 
tions to the laws of health. If the children are 
not heartily enjoying the work or the fun, try to 
find out what is wrong (not always easy), and have 
it set right promptly and wisely. It is too vital 
to ignore. 

Gymnastics and supervised recreation at school 
are but one means of preventing school fatigue. 
Development of heart, lungs, nervous system and 
body framework, the sweeping away of fatigue 
poisons and the renewal of tissues can be secured 
perhaps even better by excursions to fields, 
forests and hills; by boating, swimming and 
skating; by running errands, gardening and 
other out of door usefulnesses — ^if parents have 
the tact to introduce the play spirit, interest in 
some purpose, and enjoyment. 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 53 

May 

Idleness, evenings, dress and cigarettes 
There is more than physical benefit to think 
of in aiming to prevent school fatigue by filling 
out-of-school hours with occupations calling for 
bodily, mental and moral activities differing from 
but supplementing school life. Kipling states 
it picturesquely. 

The Camel's hump is an ugly hump 

Which well you may see at the Zoo; 
But uglier still is the hump we get 

From having too little to do. 

Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo, 
If we haven't enough to do-oo-oo, 

We get the hump — 

Cameelious hump — 
The hump that is black and blue. 

We climb out of bed with a frowzly head 

And a snarly-yarly voice. 
We shiver and scowl and we grunt and we growl 

At our bath and our boots and our toys. 

And there ought to be a corner for me 
(And I know there is one for you) 

When we get the hump — 

Cameelious hump — 
The hump that is black and blue. 

The cure for this ill is not to sit still. 

Or frowst with a book by the fire; 
But to take a large hoe and a shovel also. 

And dig till you gently perspire. 

And then you will find that the sun and the wind. 
And the Djinn of the garden too. 

Have lifted the hump — 

The horrible hump — 
The hump that is black and blue. 



54 PREVENTION OF 

I get it as well as you-oo-oo — 
If I haven't enough to do-oo-oo — 

We all get the hump — 

Cameelious hump — 
Kiddies and grown-ups too. 



Particularly at the ages from ten to sixteen, 
when child is rapidly developing into adult, too 
little to do is a genuine evil. Mothers should 
guard against idle hours, day-dreaming and 
poring over story books. The last is liable to 
become a dissipation, and all are liable to encour- 
age wastefulness of thought force and moral 
force, even inviting vicious habits of mind and 
body. "School fatigue," i.e., indifference to 
work, pallor and nervousness, can result from 
these misspent hours quite as surely as from bad 
air and sitting habits in school. 

School children's evenings should be spent at 
home, and the retiring hour should be early. 
To school children evening parties, theatres, 
concerts and other entertainments are never 
worth their cost in hours of sleep. These hours 
of sleep and the "simple life" are more important 
than parents usually think; the "educational 
value" of evening entertainments much less. 

The cigarette habit, quite apt to be begun by 
elementary schoolboys, is harmful from every 
viewpoint. So long as many men and a few 
women consider it suitable for themselves, and 
so long as others peacefully submit to having the 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 55 

air of city streets, homes, hotels, restaurants, 
places of amusement and "recreation" polluted 
by tobacco smoke, so long the boy and occasion- 
ally the girl will " ape their elders." Example and 
imitation is the most powerful "educational 
system." The tobacco smoke evil should be 
made to go with the soft coal smoke evil. 

A teacher once told me of having noticed in her 
forty years of service "waves" of the cigarette 
habit come and go with the transit of popular 
masters who smoked. Another, during a serious 
talk with her boys was interrupted by the princi- 
pal passing thru the room, leaving behind the 
characteristic odor. Thereupon one boy argued, 
"The boss smokes." Professor William A. 
McKeever has a valuable article, The Cigarette 
Smoking Boy, in Child-Welfare Magazine for 
April, 1910; and another in Education, November, 
1907. Education also publishes The Boy and the 
Cigarette Habit by H. S. Gray, January, 1909. 
The Health-Education League of Boston has a 
five cent leaflet, The Boy and The Cigarette; 
address 8 Beacon Street, Boston. All authorities 
agree that, whether or not smoking injures adults, 
it certainly seriously injures children both physi- 
cally and mentally — this means morally also. 



Dress 

Dress is a factor in school fatigue that concerns 
girls more than boys. So much has been said 



56 PREVENTION OF 

during so many years against compressing the 
bodies of girls that the majority are drest with 
considerable freedom and good judgment in this 
respect. Nothing that could be presented in 
these pages would alter the habits of others. 
There are two points that need mention, the dress 
of the head and of the feet. 

For the head I will only briefly plead for simpler 
hair dressing. The heat and confinement of the 
scalp when the hair is loaded with ribbons, 
combs, and frames for distorting the shape of 
the head are not only injurious to the growth of 
hair, but wearying. We all know the refreshment 
of letting loose long hair and giving the scalp air 
and friction. A friend says, "I am so tired I 
must rest my hair." This is one of the little 
things that help make up the day's weariness, like 
the strain of defective vision and hearing which 
we shall discuss further on in the volume. Those 
who wish our American girls to be beautiful, 
and compare the heads of Greek women that are 
as lovely today as two thousand years ago with 
photographs of modern coiffures, plead for simpler 
hairdressing among girls purely on artistic 
grounds. 

The dressing of the feet is still more important. 
The reason why girls should wear low heels 
(not more than one inch) and thick soles except 
in the two or three months of hot weather is 
that high heels and thin soles in cool weather are 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 57 

at the root of much of the ill health of menstrua- 
tion and of later life. The high heels compel 
certain muscles to pull back in order to maintain 
the balance. This alters the normal angles at 
the pelvis to the future injury of the woman, and 
requires constant tho perhaps unconscious effort 
of muscles holding the body erect that wearies 
like all constant effort. High heels produce a 
most ungraceful walk and weaken the arch of the 
foot which was designed for a level foot. This 
lessens the enjoyment of walking, climbing and 
other open air pleasures that girls need. 

Thin soles that allow the chill of the ground 
to pass to the foot and so to affect the body are a 
factor in painful menstruation. This cooling 
of the soles may not be noticed by the wearer, 
but delicate nerves are carrying their sensations 
and impulses thru lower extremities and pelvis 
to and from the spinal and central nervous sys- 
tem continually. There are not more than three 
months when the thickness of the middle forepart 
of the sole can wisely be less than one-quarter of 
an inch for either boys or girls. Thick soles can 
be soft and flexible. There should be some law 
regulating the degree of monstrosity merchants 
may offer customers, and requiring hygienic 
footgear as definitely as law requires unadulter- 
ated food. 

Another point about shoes that causes fatigue 
is the thousands of impacts daily of the hard 



58 PREVENTION OF 

heel on the hard pavement, jarring the delicate 
tissues of the cerebro-spinal nervous system. 
Nature gave us elastic heels for an elastic earth. 
I have found rubber ones (there is a good quality 
that outlasts the shoe) excellent in preventing 
fatigue and restoring exhausted nerves of patients. 
City children, certainly if not strong, would be 
better with them. 



June 

The long vacation 

In conclusion, not the least important item in 
preventing school fatigue is to start the school 
year in good condition. This means living the 
long vacation sensibly — if we must have long 
vacations. "Sensibly" translated into details 
should stand for early rising and early retiring, 
the tonic bath and all habits of external cleanliness, 
care of the mouth and all habits of internal 
cleanliness continued, with every minute possible 
spent in the open air; no wasted hours. Certain 
regular duties and responsibilities add to the 
enjoyment when wisely assigned. Summer is 
the time for developing home ideals and interest 
in home affairs, for families to become acquainted 
who have been separated by winter's occupations, 



SCHOOL FATIGUE 59 

and for mothers and fathers to grow into friend- 
ships with their children whom teachers have 
monopoHzed during their best hours. 

Summer is the time for gardening, swimming 
and boating, hill climbing, forests, fields and 
sports. Mothers should make summer at home 
a "vacation school" for their own children— not 
leave it to "run to waste." Teachers have told 
me that many return to school in the autumn hav- 
ing lost ground in many ways; that "vacation 
school" children are in better form mentally and 
physically, and by "vacation school" we mean all 
the entertainments that have been mentioned 
provided for the children by teachers who are 
nature lovers, play experts, instructors in hand 
work and domestic work — all the good things 
they do not get in school, and some of them cannot 
get at home. Many mothers' clubs plan to make 
the long vacation more profitable and happier 
for children with poor homes by supplying these 
play schools, summer gardens and nature study 
excursions. 



II 



MOTHERS' CLUBS AND CLEAN 
SCHOOLHOUSES 



The standard of healthfulness in schoolhouses should be 
that in the best kept homes 

November 

Men as housekeepers 

In our discussion of school fatigue we men- 
tioned last November the injurious effects of 
dusty, dry, overheated air in schoolrooms. 
Those few paragraphs are much too little for 
mothers — conscientious mothers — on this ex- 
tremely important matter of healthful schools. 

Many clubs are taking up the subject; also the 
Department of Science Instruction of the Na- 
tional Education Association has appointed a 
committee on the sanitary care of school premises, 
with an advisory committee of experts in sanita- 
tion. If mothers persevere in agitating for clean 
schoolhouses, and if this committee makes a 
practical report in accordance with scientific 
facts, undoubtedly improvements will result. 
61 



62 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

Already there are numerous signs of public 
awakening to the importance of janitors among 
school officials. 

The government or the public opinion that 
compels children to attend school is under moral 
obligation to keep the school as clean and whole- 
some as at least the best kept homes from which 
they are taken. If it be possible to improve on 
the best homes, it is for the interests of society 
to do so. Otherwise schools become a place where 
nose and throat and lung diseases are invited, 
contagions acquired; where the nervous system 
and the functions of the body, all of which are 
controlled by the nervous system, are injured. 
When seedlings are badly placed and starved they 
do not mature, or they are always inferior to 
those given plenty of sunlight, water and open 
air. So these children in dirty schoolhouses help 
increase the number of ailing grown-ups, and 
their children are born less vigorous than they 
might have been with sturdy parents. 

There are few things more illogical — it would 
be a huge joke if it were not so terribly tragic — 
than for a government of fathers to collect all 
sorts and conditions of children away from their 
mothers, in public buildings cared for by ordinary 
working men (rarely by women) without training 
in housekeeping or health methods. 

No good housewives have the dirty, dusty 
floors and bad smells with which government 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 63 

shuts up children and teachers. Women, even 
tho "naturally" housekeepers, are more and 
more often being trained for "their mission;" 
nurses in their schools, other women in schools 
and classes for home economics or domestic 
science, or perhaps in technical, industrial or 
trade schools. Even in colleges and universities 
training for home making is coming into its own 
and is being granted degrees of bachelor of 
science and doctor of philosophy as is done in 
courses designed more especially for men. This 
is because good housekeeping is really the practi- 
cal application of certain scientific principles in 
the arts of healthful living, and it is nothing less. 

But those who have "kept house" for several 
hundred millions of children at school in the 
United States have been and are, for the most 
part, untrained and little educated men appointed 
by other men likewise ignorant of sanitation and 
housewifery — rather inclined, in fact, to look down 
on housework as beneath a man — and therefore 
not capable judges of janitors' efficiency. The 
plea that all concerned meant well or mean well 
lessens in no smallest degree the evil effects of 
unsanitary conditions on children and teachers. 

Bad school housekeeping is partly, also, be- 
cause schools "are in politics," and our partizan 
politics based on "majority rule" long ago 
adopted the slogan, "To the victor belong the 
spoils." This means that one way of rewarding 



64 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

a man for his vote is for the successful candidate 
or party to secure him an appointment to a 
position — one with a salary usually preferred. 
School janitors, for example, are often appointed 
for their party loyalty rather than for qualifi- 
cations in sanitary care of the environment of 
children — our "neglected national asset." More 
than one has argued like the janitor of whom a 
university professor and ex-principal recently 
told me, "You can't put me out. Others have 

tried it and failed. Senator got me this 

place." (Incidentally — to encourage other prin- 
cipals in well doing — ^he was put out this time.) 

There are other calls on the mothers of the 
nation as great, but none greater than this to keep 
schoolhouses as wholesome as the best homes. It 
has much to do with morals and success in life. 
Clear heads to judge what is right or wrong and 
what makes for prosperity or for failure depend 
largely on healthy bodies. 

The death rate from tuberculosis among 
teachers is considerably higher than among all 
other workers together. Tuberculosis has been 
found after death among more than half the 
children examined who died from diphtheria, 
scarlet fever and other diseases, the presence of 
tuberculosis not being suspected. The X-ray 
and tuberculin test have discovered latent tu- 
berculosis in nearly half the delicate children 
examined. These are more likely to succumb to 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 65 

other diseases, having this latent, and it is likely 
to start up actively as the result of other diseases 
or of any cause which lessens the general health 
and resisting power, as school conditions often 
do. All who have studied the subject agree that 
schools are often the cause of nervous disorders, 
pallor and a group of symptoms that we have 
labelled "school fatigue," altho they may be in 
part due to inefficient mothers and fathers at 
home — most of whom are products of the public 
schools that have not prepared their pupils to be 
wise fathers and mothers. 

This is a "vicious circle" for mothers to break. 
Let us admit that schools as now managed are 
not as wholesome as they should and can be. 
Since dusty, vitiated, arid and overheated air 
are known to be common factors in tuberculosis 
and nervous troubles, mothers' help is needed in 
bringing about the day of clean, well aired 
schools, a condition as much like open air as 
possible. 

The fault does not lie with the janitors. If 
working men or women without specially qualify- 
ing can get positions that bring in from $700 to 
$3,000 a year, which our cities usually pay jani- 
tors, naturally they take them. The voters and 
the mothers have not yet insisted on efficient care- 
takers and clean schoolhouses. All of us like 
to receive as much for our service as we can get, 
"other things being equal." 
5 



66 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

Neither is the fault with the teachers. Institu- 
tions training general teachers rarely give them 
practice in school sanitation, and rarely even set 
them good examples; also the governing boards 
usually permit them merely to report faulty 
conditions; they must not be more active in 
improving them. Housekeepers know that it 
requires constant "following up" of unskilled 
workers to secure the details of cleanliness and 
temperature on which health depends. As I 
have said in another place, the teacher must 
"nag" the principal and "tell on" the janitor, 
jeopardizing her position that she has no political 
power to defend. Teachers and children are 
usually helpless "between the devil and the deep 
sea" in this matter. 

We are justified in expecting good housekeeping 
for schools in at least the nine or ten states where 
women are now citizens with the duties and 
responsibilities of citizens (this sentence has been 
revised to 1913). If mothers and housekeepers, 
whose "points of view governments have suffered 
so long without," bring into public service for 
children the trained skill of home makers, than 
which we have no greater need just now, the value 
of ballots in their hands is proved. If they 
continue school standards inferior to those of 
the best kept homes, the standards of men who 
are not housekeepers, they throw away a golden 
opportunity to help unfranchised women, in 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 67 

addition to overlooking the welfare of children. 
This social service is the most convincing argu- 
ment. Thoroly healthful schools are entirely 
possible. I have seen a few. 



December 

Cleaning floors 

Dust is at last recognized as a very common 
cause of ill health. The dusts from stone, metal 
and glass works, from coal mines, cotton mills 
and other dusty labor cause diseases having 
special names. Tuberculosis has been called 
"the house disease," which means that dusty 
housework has its bad eflfects. That the "house 
disease" is tuberculosis is because bacilli scattered 
by consumptives at home are not quickly killed 
by sunlight and fresh air, our houses shut out so 
much of them. Their shutting out also injures 
the general health, thus predisposing it to yield 
to disease germs, tubercle bacilli being the easiest 
to acquire. 

It is said that one cubic inch of good country 
air contains 2,000 dust particles, and the same 
amount of city air contains 3,000,000 particles 
made up of dried manure and sputum, house and 
shop sweepings, tobacco, ashes, soot, particles of 



68 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

iron, glass and stone. Schools usually have also 
much chalk dust. 

Professor C.-E. A. Winslow found 56,000 dust 
particles in a cubic meter of quiet city air, and 
20,000,000 after a dust cloud such as we cannot 
walk thru the streets without encountering 
occasionally. In a cubic meter of air in a class 
room before the class entered 2,000 dust particles 
were found; 15,000 while they were in the room; 
35,000 just after they had left. Teachers who 
have had their children make cultures of dust 
"before and after," and in corridors, playrooms, 
basements, have found janitors quite as interested 
as pupils — with good results. 

There are very few germs of contagious diseases 
in dust, especially out-door dust. They are 
usually destroyed by drying and light in a very 
short time, and widely scattered by winds. There 
are, however, many pus germs in all kinds of dust. 
An interesting account of what is known about 
this is just publisht by Professor C.-E. A. Winslow 
in the September number of American Journal 
of Public Health, 1912. The Journal ought to 
be found in any public library; but if it is not, 
the superintendent of health has it and it can be 
read with his permission, at the same time asking 
him to have the public library subscribe for the 
official journal of the American Public Health 
Association and keep it where it can be easily 
seen and read. 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 69 

Dust causes catarrhal conditions of nose, 
throat and bronchial tubes by irritating them. 
These congested (irritated) surfaces are in the best 
condition for any disease or pus germs falling on 
them to multiply. In this way dust invites ill 
health, adenoid conditions, sore eyes, tuberculosis. 
Measurements of dust in city air should arouse 
us to better municipal housekeeping, cleaner 
streets and abatement of smoke nuisances. 

To keep schoolroom floors as free as possible 
from dust that the air may be fit for children to 
live in is more important than to keep almost 
any other floor clean because the vital processes 
of children are more easily affected and the in- 
juries are more far reaching; because children in 
greater numbers are affected during longer periods 
of time in a schoolroom than in any other kind of 
room; and because in almost no other room is 
floor dust so stirred up in the air as it is by the 
many restless feet, especially during gymnastics. 

There are two points for mothers to keep 
steadily in mind in securing clean floors. The 
first is to see that the floors are in a condition to he 
kept clean. A floor that is rough, or splintered, 
or with large cracks, such as good housekeepers 
would not have uncovered at home, is unfair to 
have for children and teachers. Cracks cannot 
be kept clean, and splinters or other roughnesses 
make cleaning so difficult (almost impossible) 
that it is neglected. 



70 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

The best thing for mothers to do is to cover 
such floors with a good hnoleum, taking up a 
popular subscription if necessary, or a private 
one, to raise the funds. The agitation of itself 
will do much good. It will help educate people 
and politicians to the right of children to be well 
cared for and to one of the ways of doing it. The 
numerous bad school floors thruout the country 
could be put in practically perfect condition at 
once by a little outlay in each community. 

It will give much more satisfaction to choose 
a linoleum of one color, not in patterns. The 
easier the dust is seen, the more of it will be wiped 
up. The good housekeeper's object is to find 
the dust and remove all there is of it out of the 
room as promptly and easily as possible. 

Ferryboats, gunboats, libraries, hospitals and 
other structures where floors receive hard usage, 
or where cleanliness is specially wanted use heavy 
linoleums, some of them noiseless and fireproof. 
These are rather expensive at first, but I am not 
sure that in the end they are so — certainly they 
are not if estimated in terms of life as well as in 
dollars and cents. The ordinary inlaid linoleum 
is less expensive, and will last so long that a good 
quality of it is worth laying. I know a hard used 
school floor where it is just giving out after fifteen 
years. 

A good housekeeper or "expert" should closely 
supervise laying it, seeing that no cracks are left, 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 71 

especially at the sides, which the average workman 
almost always leaves. For the heavier linoleums 
there is a liquid crack filler that hardens in place. 
If laid to curve up against the walls and properly 
made fast, with concave corners fitted, there is 
less resting place for dust. The metal corners 
for sale at hardware stores are very necessary to 
have for corners of rooms and stairs. There are 
also concave moldings that can be laid along the 
sides of rooms where walls and floor meet so that 
dirt may be removed more thoroly and easily; 
for the easier, the oftener. In these and all the 
following details mothers have to take buildings 
already erected and make the best of them. 

Mothers' clubs convinced of the fundamental 
importance of cleanliness in schools can find 
money to do these things in this age of generous 
giving and generous work. I know two or three 
teachers who have laid linoleum at their own 
expense — one more instance of these overtaxt 
and poorly paid women showing more intelligent 
appreciation of children's well-being than parents 
or school boards. 

When this first condition has been secured, 
floors with smooth surfaces and concave meeting 
with walls, there come next the problems of proper 
cleaning. Good housekeepers all over the country 
unquestionably can have school floors kept as 
clean as their home floors, for a few janitors are 
doing it, and while doing it stir up only the very 
little dust it seems impossible to avoid. 



72 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

One of the most interesting floors I have seen 
is in a crowded school in the heart of a smoky 
city. It was eight years old when I saw it, i 
Georgia pine, and the yellow grain was almost [ 
as bright as if the floor had been laid that month. 
The janitor had never used water on it. He had 
always used a hair broom in whose wooden cross 
piece is a little reservoir containing a spoonful 
of kerosene. This escapes in barely enough 
quantity to keep the hairs oiled, but much short 
of dripping. Housewives know that a few drops 
of kerosene in dishwashing or laundering is an 
excellent cleanser. It is an excellent germ killer, 
too. Such a broom, therefore, intelligently used 
prevents much dust flying as well as cleaning 
thoroly; and the slight odor, as I specially 
noticed, was all gone before school opened in the 
morning after the sweeping of the night before. 

I have askt other janitors why they do not use 
this broom. They replied either that they 
"tried it but it got out of order," or that they had 
not heard of it. No janitor should be appointed 
without mechanical skill to keep tools in order and 
to make simple repairs about the building. 

A few janitors pin rough cloth (ingrain carpet 
remnants bought from factories at a few cents a 
pound) moistened with a mixture of linseed oil 
and turpentine, with perhaps a little parafiin 
added, around hair brooms and get admirable 
results, a clean floor that hardly soils a white 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 73 

handkerchief rubbed on it, and this with the 
minimum stirring up of dust in the air when 
rightly done. Sawdust wet with water is not 
good, as minute sphnters remain that make an 
irritating dust when dry. Even in stables and 
cellars it has this objection. Sawdust that has 
evenly absorbed a httle oil and turpentine is 
more suitable for floors; other preparations also 
are used to moisten it, one being a weak solution 
of formaldehyde for disinfecting the floor once a 
week. It is important that the sawdust come in 
contact with every bit of the surface and every 
particle of dust on the floor; but often it lies in 
masses and little attempt is made to have this 
done. 

There is one positive danger in using any of 
these methods for lessening dust. It is that some 
principals and janitors assume that no dust rises, 
or "not enough to do any harm." Janitors 
therefore sweep corridors, and even rooms, while 
schools are in session and children at study after 
school hours. I have more than once seen this 
done, the air being irritatingly dusty to anyone 
not determined that he would not see it — or would 
not admit it. My impression is that it is not a 
very uncommon occurrence. In such sweeping 
of corridors the claim that the doors of class 
rooms are closed and so it is safe to sweep is not 
to be tolerated; for sometimes I have seen one not 
closed, and frequently I have seen a child or 



74 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

several people passing through corridors at the 
time of sweeping and entering rooms. All this is 
even more serious in common sweeping with straw 
brooms. Children and teachers are shut in and 
cannot help themselves. Mothers can stop it 
if they will. 

The health officer of one of our states writes 
approvingly of a lawsuit against school authori- 
ties brought by parents whose child was un- 
doubtedly injured by the unsanitariness of the 
school. He believes the quickest way of bringing 
school people into line with health methods is a 
few more such legal processes. 

Wood floors properly scrubbed with soap and 
water as I have found them in a few schools are 
refreshingly clean and smell so; but even hard- 
wood floors will wear rough and splintery with 
this treatment. One school with clean white 
floors, and fresh sweet air has one of its three 
stories scrubbed every Saturday in rotation, so 
that once every three weeks each floor is thoroly 
cleaned. Janitors ordinarily, however, think 
scrubbing floors women's work, and will not do it 
themselves. It is so hard and disagreeable that 
they pronounce it "unnecessary," and their 
opinion has prevailed. 

Linoleum after sweeping with a hair broom 
preferably can easily be cleaned with a cloth 
slightly moistened with oil or water; or the oiled 
cloth can be used on the broom in sweeping, y 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 75 

One of the best helps in cleaning jBoors is to have 
either movable furniture, as a few schools have, 
or desk and seat with a single, perfectly round 
or oval standard having no crannies for dust to 
collect in and offering fewer obstacles to tools. 

Floors should be left as dry as possible after 
using either oil or water. The odor of dirty 
drying oil or water should not be permitted, and 
the dried deposit is so much more dirt on the floor. 
Such a detail as this is not necessary to state to a 
good housekeeper, and is mentioned here to add 
point to the fact that with any good method must 
go competent supervision to ensure its proper 
use. School floors should be cleaned as often 
as necessary to keep them as wholesome as in 
well kept homes. 



January 

Last month suggestions were made for the 
cleanliness of floors in ordinary schoolhouses, 
such as mothers find have been erected by 
ordinary committees in ordinary communities. 

But occasionally we see elaborate buildings, 
tiled floors and wainscotings, vacuum cleaners, 
a generous staff of caretakers who wipe away dust 
and keep surfaces bright thruout the day, as do 



76 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

the maids in homes of wealth. These exceptions 
are costly and the all-round results are not always 
superior to what we find in much less pretentious 
buildings. Indeed, I fancy that under the stimu- 
lus of open air schools and school gardens these 
structures will be out of date before many years, 
and we shall swing over to less extravagant but 
more wholesome places where children will live 
a less artificial life as training for a saner manhood 
and womanhood. That word should be noted — 
"places," not buildings merely. 

It seems desirable that wood floors should be 
abandoned in school buildings as they already 
have been in most fine public structures. One of 
the reasons is the greater difficulty of keeping 
them clean in comparison with smoother flooring 
materials. Even the latter demand intelligence 
and conscientiousness in the care of them. "Bat- 
tleship linoleum" promises to be as nearly an 
ideal flooring for schools as for hospitals and the 
navies of various nations. It will last for a 
quarter century, and can be easily renewed; is 
elastic, noiseless, waterproof and fire proof, not 
easy to stain, dirt does not grind into it, and it 
comes in a pleasant solid brown color; all this 
for not far from a dollar and a quarter a square 
yard. It is quarter of an inch thick, made of 
linseed oil and ground cork on a foundation of 
burlap under heavy pressure, with a smooth finish 
that is easily cleaned. It is laid by a special 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 77 

process making it firm and free from cracks. Any 
large dealer in linoleums can provide the circulars 
telling about it. I have not seen it in any schools, 
but have seen it on ferry boats and in large public 
buildings, as institutes, office buildings, churches, 
hospitals — the last being the beautiful new chil- 
dren's hospital at the Johns Hopkins Medical 
School, at this date the most complete in every 
sanitary detail of any in any country. Here a 
kind of composition is used for the baseboards 
which curve down to the floor, meeting the lin- 
oleum. All cracks have the hard filling that has 
been mentioned. It is good to find at this hospi- 
tal every roof, both of the various wings and of 
the main part, utilized for outdoor wards and 
outdoor sleeping and play. 

Whatever the floor may be, a committee of 
mothers should watch their condition in a co- 
operative spirit, as some mothers' committees 
have helpt in the matter of school lunches. 



Lavatories and basements 

The standards of cleanliness for water-closets, 
washbowls and basements should be, also, as in 
the best homes. Perfumed " disinfectants " should 
not be permitted. They do not disinfect. Odor- 
less air should be insisted on. Whenever I have 
enquired how some specially clean and fresh 
smelling public or institutional water-closet was 



78 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

kept so, the caretaker's reply has been "Plenty 
of strong soapsuds." 

A few pages back a janitor was spoken of 
whose interest in a handsome floor and kerosene 
broom proved what all janitors could do if they 
would. He was not an all-round good janitor, 
however, for the odor greeting one on entering his 
building was of urinals that were easily located 
by following the scent. It was not entirely his 
fault, for they were wrongly built at first, and no 
one had cared enough about it to alter them. 
Fancy the mother or father of one son in a forty 
thousand dollar house who would let such a 
mistake go eight years — or eight months! But 
here were only — thousands of everyone's sons and 
daughters under the care of the city fathers. 

The condition is true of many schools, and, 
indeed, of the science (!) building of a famous 
New England university. Befoulment of the 
air is not the most important result of these 
dirty water-closets. The uncleanness of which 
the odors warn us may be accompanied by con- 
tagious disease germs, such as the gonococcus 
freshly deposited, or typhoid bacilli, and others. 
Medical inspection is discovering that gonococcus 
infection is occasionally found among school chil- 
dren and caretakers, as are typhoid, tuberculosis 
and other germs. They may all be communi- 
cated by use of common towel and water-closet, 
as they are by sleeping with or being cared for by 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 79 

infected parents and nurses. Altogether too few 
schools make sufficient provision for hand washing 
after leaving water-closets, one of the most needed 
habits to cultivate in this country among children 
at school and at home. Some schools are provid- 
ing paper hand towels for washbowls; others 
require each child to have its own towel and to be 
responsible for its laundering. It should be held 
criminal to have either a common towel or com- 
mon cup. The method of supplying tissue toilet 
paper is also another subject for mothers to attend 
to. There are odd ways. 

In country places where outhouses are used the 
same standards of cleanliness must in some way be 
secured for the good of the children. There is 
here the additional problem of flies that carry 
filth from the vault to every object they light on, 
children's faces, books, luncheons. The house 
fly is being called the "typhoid fly " as it is known 
to carry bacilli from typhoid discharges to the 
well. It is coming to be well known that the 
Japanese in their war with Russia lost almost no 
soldiers from typhoid fever partly because they 
covered all excreta away from flies, filth carriers. 
They proved better sanitarians than the Ameri- 
cans in the Cuban war who left their trenches 
open, as many schoolhouses still do, and lost 
many more men by typhoid then were killed by 
the enemy. In "American Schoolhouses," a 
bulletin of the Bureau of Education that should 



80 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

be in the public library, mothers can obtain 
further information concerning this detail of 
country schools. They should see that vaults 
are cleaned frequently and kept well sprinkled 
with lime; but if any residences in the vicinity 
have modern plumbing, why not the school- 
house? 



The common cup: emergencies 

Our topic is clean schoolhouses, and it is fair 
to call the common cup a part of the schoolhouse 
since it is chained to the wall. 

The sooner mothers insist on its banishment, 
the safer their children will be from other chil- 
dren's sore lips, sore mouths, poison of decaying 
teeth and sore throats. The germs of tuberculosis, 
diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles, pneumonia, and 
other disease germs are often in the mouths of the 
well. These children and people are called 
"carriers." Dr. C. V. Chapin and others have 
shown that contact with these "carriers," as by 
their saliva on a cup, causes many illnesses. 
Before children are known to be "coming down" 
with a contagious disease their saliva may be left 
on the cup for the next user to drink. 

Specialists who have examined school cups 
find under the microscope thousands of cells 
from the skin and lining of the mouth, with thou- 
sands of bacteria clinging to them, some of the 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 81 

bacteria being those causing illnesses. The lips 
and saliva when a child is drinking always touch 
the cup. Every "catching" thing one child has 
who uses it those who come after him are liable 
to get. It is truly astounding that, well known as 
this is, there are hundreds of schools, yes, thou- 
sands, from New England to the Pacific still using 
the common cup. It is eloquent testimony to 
the indifference of American fathers and mothers 
to the welfare of their children. 

There are two books the public library should 
provide for mothers' clubs to use in this connec- 
tion. One is Dr. Chapin's Sources and Modes of 
Infection where can be read the latest facts that 
are discovered about "carriers," whether they are 
well or ill people, or insects, or water or milk. The 
living germs conveyed by these carriers cause 
illnesses. Time, drying and sunlight kill very 
many bacteria in a few hours or days after they 
leave the carrier; a few others may live for a 
month or longer. So that it is really contact with 
people more than with things that is dangerous. 
Touching the fresh saliva or any other discharge 
from people is practically contact with them. 

The other book is The Human Body and Health 
by the professor of biology at Lafayette College, 
Alvin Davison. The illustrations on pages 261, 
263 and 265 are true reproductions from life of 
what anyone looking thru a microscope finds that 
people leave on drinking cups. Whether or not 
6 



82 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

the text is read, it does not seem possible that any 
mother after seeing the pictures can allow her 
child to use a common cup at school, or on a train, 
or at a public fountain. 

But must children go thirsty? We have 
already discust some of the reasons why they 
should have plenty of water. They need not go 
without it so long as they can find a piece of paper 
eight inches square. Even clean newspaper is 
safer than the common cup; but a piece of fresh 
writing or wrapping paper would be better. Of 
course there are "germs" on clean paper, but in 
all probability not disease germs. 

Fold the square diagonally. Next fold the 
two distant corners over on opposite sides until 
the tips touch the opposite edges; crease them 
down; separate the two layers of the middle 
corner, crease one over in one direction as far as 
it will go, and the other over in the other direction. 
If, now, the two edges left are opened with the 
fingers, there is a substantial cup for one or two 
"glasses" of water. 

Get the teacher to have all her children make 
paper cups. They are likely to find it the most 
interesting lesson in "physiology" they have ever 
had, for she will explain the reasons for individual 
cups while they make them. They can use cups 
until the city fathers make up their minds to put 
in bubble fountains or faucets by which children 
can drink from a little jet of water without touch- 
ing anything. 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 83 

Kansas, Michigan and Mississippi first adopted 
regulations against the common cup in schools and 
railway trains (1909). 

Massachusetts, Wisconsin and California were 
the first to enact laws forbidding it in schools, on 
railway trains and in other public places. Two 
winters ago (1911) it was amusing to watch pas- 
sengers on trains from Boston turn away from the 
cupless watertanks; but when the Rhode Island 
border was reacht the common cup was brought 
out, and all the way to New York, Philadelphia 
and Washington every user — ! Mothers even 
put it to the sweet lips of their babies! This 
winter, however, it is equally entertaining — and 
encouraging — to see how, law or no law in the 
state thru which the train is passing, nearly every 
passenger has his own cup. 

Professor Elizabeth Gaines of the department 
of biology at Adelphi Academy, with many school 
teachers, began using the paper cup we have 
described during epidemics of diphtheria and 
scarlet fever in Brooklyn, and led in another 
movement that mothers' clubs could undertake 
in their own communities where the feather 
duster, common cup and dirty, badly ventilated 
schoolrooms exist. The New York School Hy- 
giene Association of which Professor Gaines was 
president sent to the Board of Education a 
petition signed by parents asking 

1, That the common drinking cup be abolisht 
in the schools, giving facts and the reasons. 



84 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

2. That the feather duster be aboUsht, moist 
sweeping be required; and better methods 
of cleaning and ventilating be provided in 
new buildings, giving facts and reasons. 

3. That specific rules for cleaning be made by 
experts, and janitors be required to observe 
them, using some of the arguments from 
the preceding pages. 

4. That better provision for class instruction 
in hygiene be made. 

Soon after the Brooklyn schools began using 
the paper cup an enthusiast sent about a thousand 
New Year's greetings with the cup anonymously 
to as many health officers and school men. Pretty 

soon it appeared under the name of the "Dr. 

cup," and a little later differences of opinion arose 
among school men who wanted to patent it ! Of 
course its real value is that children can always 
make their own cups wherever they may need 
them. Apparently the paper cup is a valuable 
sanitary asset. 

One superintendent writes: "I hope the time 
will come when we can have the sanitary drinking 
fountain in all the schools. Until that time, this 
seems to be an excellent and inexpensive means 
of meeting the serious situation presented by 
either the common drinking cup or supplying the 
individual cups of the ordinary type. I will see 
what can be done to encourage the making and 
use of this paper cup . ' ' The objections to children 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 85 

having their private cups are that they do not 
keep them clean, and lending a cup to a thirsty 
friend is a courtesy that teachers cannot quite 
so easily criticize as they can "swapping chewing 
gum." Unless one knows something better, this 
extemporized cup is a good makeshift anywhere 
to avoid public cups. The common drinking cup 
is dangerous. 



February 

Walls and windows 

The worst schoolroom walls I have ever hap- 
pened to see were not long ago in a famous state 
with four syllables in its name, and in a few places 
just over its borders — not always obscure villages, 
but in at least one large and often-heard-of school. 
They were papered walls (ugly paper, too, inciden- 
tally) and sometimes two or three layers deep, with 
torn and loosened fragments. 

Good housekeepers have old paper removed and 
walls cleaned before the new is put on. The 
pastes and papers absorb odors and dampness, and 
lodge molds, vermin, micro-organisms and dust, 
affecting the atmosphere of the room more or 
less. These papered walls are as bad as what I 
omitted mentioning having seen in talking about 



86 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

clean jfloors — carpeted kindergartens. In three 
schools I have seen ingrain or brussels carpets put 
down because the floors were splintered, or 
because in some games the children must sit on 
the floor and it is cold in winter or "so very dirty." 

The fact should be recalled that the younger 
children are, the more rapid their vital processes; 
they are growing faster; therefore the effects of 
dust inhaled are more far reaching, one of the 
reasons for the increase of tuberculosis all thru 
school life, and for the so-called "school fatigue." 
They should have the best surroundings like the 
high school, not the dirtiest. The same process 
of reasoning also applies to the quality of teaching. 

The smooth easily cleaned linoleum that has 
been advised for splintered floors would be cold, 
too. There might be experimenting with art 
squares that can be hung out of doors and beaten 
every night, and not laid until just before school 
opens, with properly adjustable floor fastenings. 
But with the many health difficulties and practical 
difficulties perhaps normal children can be better 
grown without "floor games." Or we might 
learn lessons of the clean floors of Eastern races 
who do not use chairs, who sometimes use rugs 
also, and put off their street shoes at the entrances 
of their houses. 

To return to school walls — they are sometimes 
defaced by scribbling, handmarks and other 
spots of several years standing, especially the 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 87 

water-closets. Some walls are so dark in color 
that light in the room is lessened and children 
weary from efforts to see; or so pale and white 
with bright windows that eyes are dazzled and 
nerves are tired. In both cases permanent injury 
to the eyes is liable to result, if not to the nervous 
system. There are broken walls and ceilings, 
adding to the dustiness; and rough finisht walls, 
every little projection a settling place for dust 
that slight air currents start floating again in the 
air children have to breathe. 

Mothers have no more moral right to allow 
government authorities, committees or any other 
power to place their children in surroundings that 
injure health than they have themselves to keep 
such surroundings. Mothers are responsible for 
knowing that the environment is a safe one. So 
are fathers. If an unheal thful one, the fact that 
school authorities keep it so does not lessen 
parents' duties — each parent's — to prevent it. 
The duties of parenthood cannot be shuffled off 
on paid or elected officials. Parents must still 
hold such officials up to the duties they are paid 
or elected to perform — in this instance to develop 
potential fathers and mothers with healthy bodies, 
minds and ideals. 

Mothers' clubs, better than an individual alone 
with no backing in numbers, can study the clean- 
liness of a school and "make the best of" bad 
floors and bad walls by intelligent effort. Except 



88 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

in the nine equal suffrage states mothers have 
rather helplessly to take things as they find them 
and make the best of them, as they have long had 
to do in poorly constructed and finisht houses — 
not a bad training of the wits for bettering school 
conditions. Only one needs to he sure that the 
proposed change is really an improvement, and does 
not add more details for overworkt teachers to 
see to. 

It is not a great expense to remove wall paper 
(wetting it first to prevent dust flying and to save 
the workmen from it), clean and paint the walls. 
Oil paints are always at hand; their application 
is understood everywhere. Smooth painted walls 
can be washt; wiped down with dry mop to 
remove dust; they are non-absorbent and durable. 
The glossiness of some paints should be avoided, 
for like the glossy printed page, it is bad for the 
eyes. There are numerous tinted washes also, 
some less expensive than paint, as easily applied 
as paint or more so, their re-application being no 
more work than washing painted walls. 

Ceilings should be white, thus sending more 
light down to the desks; but white walls are trying 
to the eyes in a strong light. In sunny bright 
rooms walls of pale green, a very pale gray green, 
not a hard yellow green, are artistic and restful 
to eyes and nerves. In north or darkish rooms 
pale buff or ecru reflect a sunny light. It is worth 
while to consult some one with a fine eye for 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 89 

shades of color (mothers supplying the sanitary 
ideas), for a profound impression on good taste 
as well as on health is made by children's school 
environment, even by the tint of walls. A 
beautiful shade need cost no more than a crude 
one. 

Whatever the colors, good school housekeepers 
will see that walls are kept clean and dusted as 
necessary, either with dry mops or with soft 
absorbent cloth fastened around brooms. Some 
walls need cleaning oftener than others for reasons 
explained further on. 

Decorations also are a problem in wall sanita- 
tion. Many walls in rooms of the younger grades 
are more or less covered with paper festoons, 
greens, banners, drawings on paper by the pupils, 
etc. These temporarily in place serve their 
immediate good purposes; but should be carefully 
taken down after a week of dust deposits and 
removed out of doors for cleaning if any are to be 
preserved. Much of this is not the kind of decora- 
tion for which we wish the country to acquire 
a liking, and it soon becomes unsanitary. 

A few good pictures, pictures with a mission, 
or even one, placed in good light, framed in natural 
woods with soft finish showing the grain, can be 
easily dusted, and, if chosen with good judgment, 
can be used to interest and educate children in 
health ideas still further. Often one sees pictures 
that provoke the question, "Why here"; pictures 
that the pupils and sometimes the teachers know 



90 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

nothing about, or next to nothing. They have 
been seen daily, but with "eyes that see not." 

I have often wisht that there could be placed 
in a few hundred schools a large portrait of 
Pasteur, with the story of his life (that is as 
fascinating as a novel) in the school library, and 
then see what would result if mothers' clubs 
stimulated questions year after year about the 
man and his service to us all. It could be made 
the means of creating as high ideals of patriotism 
by right living as portraits and stories of Washing- 
ton and Lincoln. 

History and science are both more alive to 
children when some one or some thing "stands 
for" either. A portrait of Walter Scott leads 
from his "life story" to history and good fiction; 
of Maria Mitchell, to the greatness of the universe 
outside the earth and to the affection and possi- 
bilities in plain living and high thinking. If a 
picture is worth room on school walls it should be 
a means of right education, since it inevitably has 
an influence, and much study can be put in select- 
ing one. 

Windows should be washt at least three times 
during the school year, with water in which is a 
little kerosene, which is cheaper and gives an 
easier and more lasting clearness than sand soaps 
or other soaps that after the first rain are often 
followed by streaks and cloudiness; kerosene is 
also more comfortable for the hands in cold 



GLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 91 

weather. These washings should come in Sep- 
tember and late December, just before schools 
open, and in February. The spring months 
invite open windows and have more light, so that 
when more than three washings are impossible, 
these months are safest for omitting them; also, 
sunny rooms with bright light can be safely 
omitted when necessary for the sake of north and 
poorly lighted rooms, whose windows must be 
kept constantly clear. 

Eyes are workt by tiny muscles controlled 
by nerves running to the brain. Just like any 
other muscles, if these are strained by trying to 
do their work under bad conditions they get out of 
order and defects of vision result; and just like 
other nerves, if the will forces these to work under 
difficulties — too little light or light of a bad kind, 
they become exhausted and other defects of vision 
may result. 

There is a close sympathy between all parts 
of the nervous system, so that when the feet are 
tired, for example, or the ears from listening to the 
racket of machinery all day, we "feel tired all 
over." In the same way tired eyes make children 
tired all over, and permanent defects in vision 
cause them to tire more easily, possibly to have 
various nervous disorders, headaches or indiges- 
tion, that wearing suitable glasses will sometimes 
relieve; but the child is handicapped for life. 
This also is a part of " school fatigue." 



92 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

Those who damage children in this way should 
be punishable as are street car companies or 
factory owners when life, limb or health is lost 
because suitable precautions are not taken. 
Neither means to do the harm, they state; but 
— I have just come from a new school building 
one side of which is so shaded by the neighboring 
structure that the gas was lighted all this slightly 
cloudy morning. The harm that this is doing can 
never be undone by explanations of oflBcials — the 
same that the voters elect year after year and do 
not call to account for such an outrage as this. 
With our abundance of land, of light and of good 
air, there is no right reason for depriving children 
of all they need for health. 

Windows sufficiently clean to allow ample 
light to come thru are then a factor in health. 
Much depends on the adjustment of shades, which 
must not allow direct sunlight on the desks or 
reflected from a light or glossy surface into the 
eyes. The best light is had when shades pull 
up from the bottom, letting a diffused light pour 
down from above; but they are little used. One 
girl said, "They make me feel lonesome." They 
may produce a shut-in feeling, but this is not a 
good reason for not having them. 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 93 

March 

An interlude 

While these chapters are going into details of 
schoolhouse keeping necessary to provide good 
air for children, another method of securing it is 
growing fast, and will profoundly modify school 
methods, I am confident, both in the direction 
of health and of economy as well. 

In memory of their little daughter of twelve 
years who died, a Chicago father and mother 
establisht a fund for the benefit of other children. 
With the income several wise movements have 
been aided, but none better or greater than the 
movement for open air schools, which began in 
Providence a few years ago. 

Dr. Ellen A. Stone and Dr. Mary S. Packard, 
after a summer's experience with a play school for 
delicate and tuberculous children on the shady 
southern lawn of the former's home, secured the 
consent and cooperation of the superintendent 
of health and school committee in taking out 
the whole southern side of a schoolroom and 
opening the first "Fresh Air School" in this 
country. Many such rooms better than this one 
now exist in different states, and they are multi- 
plying rapidly; but "c'est le premier pas qui coute." 

A charming little book, illustrated, has just 
been pubUsht, "Open Air Crusaders: A Report 
of the Elizabeth McCormick Open Air School," 
with this dedication: "To the memory of Eliza- 



94 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

beth. Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus Hall 
McCormick, a child whose radiant young life was 
so marked by deeds of kindliness to others that 
these ministries of love were not allowed to cease 
when, at the age of twelve, she was called into the 
presence of the Great Friend of all the children." 

There is no healthier philosophy than this — to 
multiply one's own work for good so that the 
ministries of the lost one may not cease. 

The title page states that thru the generosity 
of the trustees of the fund the United Charities 
of Chicago is enabled to place this book before 
the public free of charge. In reply to a letter 
asking whether the demand would be too great 
if the secretary of every mothers' or parent- 
teacher association asked for a copy, the General 
Superintendent replied: "We are anxious that 
it should be put to the widest possible use, and 
I can think of no way in which it would more 
quickly reach the very persons whom we are 
wanting to interest in the work than by the sug- 
gestion that mothers' clubs and parent- teacher 
associations make it the subject of discussion. 
We are prepared to meet a reasonably large 
demand for the book." The first edition was 
exhausted in a few days, and now many more have 
been issued. It can be obtained for the asking by 
addressing the United Charities of Chicago, 51 
LaSalle Street. 

A program whose speakers are a medical in- 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 95 

spector, school nurse, and the superintendents 
of health and of schools can bring this very impor- 
tant advance before the friends of a mothers' 
club. Where the subject has been already dis- 
cust, but there is not yet an open air room in 
every new schoolhouse planned, and in at least 
one old building in every neighborhood, then it 
should be presented again with the determination 
that something more than mere talk shall follow. 
There are occasional mothers who have for their 
little children of about kindergarten or primary 
ages a "home open air school," and near by 
mothers are delighted when permitted to send their 
own children to these happy places. 

Mothers have a large measure of responsibility 
for the bad conditions in so many schools, even 
when they have not the power to discharge their 
responsibility effectively. But all are soon to 
have this power. The signs of the times are un- 
mistakable, and there is no higher law resting 
on them than this of responsibility for children 
wherever children may be in the community — home 
or school, street or work place, place of entertain- 
ment or of recreation. 



96 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

April 

Streets and housecleaning 

A Chicago mother wrote me not long ago: "I 
have found rooms 74° and 76° and even 82°, 
and the teachers wearing 'peek-a-boo' waists, 
while the children wore woolen underwear and 
dresses suitable for winter in this climate. Some 
schools use soft coal, and we have to strain the 
air. I put cheesecloth over the open bedroom 
windows with thumb tacks. There is a school 
where the in-take for air is over garbage pails of 
families living across the alley; the outlet is over 
the girls' playground!" 

This all reads true, for one can find the like 
in other places. The good thing here is that at 
least one mother has cared, and I have no doubt 
she has made others care, too, since she has been 
so wise as to look into conditions. Evidently 
"clean schoolhouses " require attention to other 
details besides floors, walls, windows and furnish- 
ings. 

Cleaning school buildings is made unnecessa- 
rily difficult, even useless sometimes, by certain 
factors outside the building. Dirty streets are 
one. Streets are unnecessarily dirty because 
they are either badly cared for or badly made. 
Their dust as every housewife knows, can in a 
few blustering hours entirely undo wearisome 
and expensive labors. 

Such dust is brought in on children's shoes, or 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 97 

blown in around windows and doors or through 
the cold air box of the furnace. It is, as has been 
said aheady, made up not of sand alone, but of 
dried manure, sputum and other animal waste, of 
house and shop sweepings, ashes, soot, particles 
of iron, glass, tobacco and other vegetable mate- 
rial. It contains but few germs of tuberculosis 
and other diseases, and abounds in pus germs. 

These irritating and poisonous particles drawn 
in thru nose and throat irritate and poison the 
delicate mucous membrane lining of nose, throat 
and bronchial tubes, causing much catarrhal 
trouble. Physicians whose specialty is diseases 
of nose and throat look for many more cases of 
"cold in the head," "sore throat" and bronchitis 
after wind storms; chronic catarrh is aggravated 
in dusty weather. Adenoids and adenoid con- 
ditions, tonsilitis, tuberculosis and some other 
germ diseases that aflfect the respiratory passages 
develop more easily in this catarrhal tissue. 
Autopsies show that city dwellers' lungs, instead 
of a healthy pink, are more often a dirty dark 
color like the lungs of those working in coal mines 
and in other dusty occupations, with fibrous 
thickenings and nodules where more or less 
inflammatory changes have taken place. These 
inflammations are not enough perhaps always to 
make people ill in bed, but they lessen vitality 
and predispose to disease. 

This is one of the reasons why country life, 
7 



98 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

"other things being equal," is healthier than city 
life where fifteen hundred times as many dust 
particles float in the air we breathe. We have 
spoken of the high death rate from tuberculosis 
among teachers, and the very large amount of 
tuberculosis among children that increases thru 
school years, except among "open air school" 
children. This street dust trackt and blown 
in is an important part of such ill health, altho 
not the whole cause. 

Streets can injure health in another way, as we 
found in our study of school fatigue last year. I 
know a school placed in the sharp angle between 
two streets paved with cobble stones over which 
heavy wagons travel. The noise is so great that 
teachers unconsciously develop unpleasant voices 
in their efl'orts to be heard. Both teachers and 
pupils feel the strain of this almost continuous 
bombardment of their ears. Noisy and dusty 
streets around schools are common. 

We must aim to have some day soon every 
school in the midst of grass, trees and gardens — 
children's gardens which they care for as a part of 
their education. We have the land, the money 
and the children — everything but the intelligence 
to so adjust them as to bring it about. This will 
come after a few thousand — or must it be millions 
— more lives have been sacrificed in teaching the 
lesson. We shall arrive. 

Meanwhile superintendents of streets, public 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 99 

opinion and politics must be won over to the cause 
of dustless, quiet highways around homes and 
schools; it is also possible to have them around 
many business places as a few are showing. 
Mothers' clubs can do much to help this along. 
One meeting every year with speakers from among 
those directly working in the department of 
streets of the local government, as well as from 
among those interested in the health and in the 
housekeeping sides, with a good account of it in 
the newspapers, and with an active committee 
that pushes the matter along even when not on 
the program of a meeting, will accomplish things 
worth while. Talking merely is not enough. 

One topic might well be, "What is the least 
dusty and noisy material for street paving?" 
It is much more interesting than it sounds. I 
remember a discussion on it among Boston physi- 
cians a few years ago that was publisht in the 
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, August 2 
and September 6, 1900. If it is not in the medical 
library of the city, or cannot be borrowed from 
one of the physicians, it can be bought for twenty 
cents sent to the office of the Journal in Boston. 
Mothers' clubs can make the subject so popular 
that sensible articles may be found more often. 

Another good topic is, "Shall we have oil or 
water sprinkling?" Another is, "Shall street 
cleaning be allowed when streets are dry?" There 
are usually two sides (at least) to public questions. 



100 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

and the wise club will hear both; but make up its 
own mind in accordance with the interests of the 
children and family. 

Meanwhile, too, janitors with the extra work 
caused by bad management of streets are not 
only obliged to clean the inside of the buildings, 
but like other housekeepers need to devise ways 
for keeping out dust and mud. There is the 
problem of door mats. What kind wears longest, 
cleans shoes best, and can be kept cleanest? 
Several have told me that woven wire mats are 
best in these ways. Some janitors, on stormy 
days, have brushes at the entrance for cleaning 
shoes before children go in. The brush part of 
old hair brooms removed from the handle and cut 
in two brushes is economy and quite effective. 
Here is another condition that provokes us to ask 
about the Oriental custom of removing street 
shoes and putting on house slippers at entrances. 
Street shoes, long street skirts, and dirty streets 
are a trio of nuisances that must be replaced by 
clean practices. 

Quite as important as the care of air after it 
has come thru the cold air box is the kind of air 
that comes thru it. There are cold air boxes 
drawing their supply of "fresh" air from the level 
of sidewalks and streets, and the pipe of the pass- 
ing smoker is distinctly smelt in the house; if 
tobacco smoke, then of course, any other smell 
from passers-by is drawn in as well as dust. To 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 101 

be sure there may not be disease germs in this 
air, but is it what it should be for children's air 
supply? It is not thought to be so, and architects 
and builders writing on the subject positively 
condemn such locating of the fresh air box. 

Sometimes, as the quotation from the letter 
testifies, the air is drawn from alleys where garbage 
or other rubbish is kept. When cloth for sifting 
air is placed over in-takes it quickly becomes heavy 
with a blackish deposit. When air is washt by 
spraying or by showers of water in certain ven- 
tilating systems the washings make a muddy 
stream whose "mud" might have gone in chil- 
dren's lungs instead, as much goes. Builders of 
schoolhouses say such systems should always be 
used in soft coal cities, but are not so necessary 
in anthracite cities; nevertheless several pails 
of dirt — five I am told — were washt out of the 
air in one week in a Brooklyn school standing in a 
good neighborhood. 

This leads us back again to the cleanliness of 
streets and byways around the school. If any 
mother does not know that the conditions are as 
they should be around her own child's school, 
perhaps those five pails of dirt may interest her 
to find out. It is tempting Providence to com- 
fortably assume in the face of such facts that 
ofllcials care so much more than mothers about 
mothers' own children. 

Or it may be that the school yard itself is at 



102 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

fault. Does the outlet for bad air empty in the 
playground as this letter reports, or in some other 
place where children get it directly? Is it a muddy 
yard, or in some other way not fit for children's 
use, and giving them a low ideal of what the 
surroundings of the place they live in should be? 
If so, mothers' clubs can " attain merit " by putting 
it in good condition, as many clubs have already 
done, and by encouraging children to do as much 
of the work themselves as possible, and to keep 
it as it should be. Some cities, Cleveland for 
example, have beautiful settings of greenery for 
all their schoolhouses in which children take great 
pride and for whose good condition they feel 
responsible. Most school yards are ugly. It is 
not always money so much as it is brains that 
is needed. Working on such an improvement 
helps arouse interest in the need of larger, much 
larger plots of land around schools. 

Another not uncommon cause of schoolhouse 
dirtiness is its standing directly in the path of the 
prevailing winds bringing smoke from a factory 
or other chimney. This increases the labor and 
expense of keeping rooms and windows clean; or, 
which is more usual, they are not kept clean, and 
health suffers — a greater expense in the end. 
Some such chimneys also send out injurious gases 
and disagreeable odors. There are methods of 
preventing all these defilements of the air we live 
in — or die in. In a few places there are laws 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 103 

requiring these methods to be used, but they are 
rarely well enforced. Just as city fathers aUow 
saloons, houses of ill-fame and the evils always 
cropping out in their neighborhoods to educate 
many children more hours in the year than do our 
schools, so they allow dirty streets and business 
methods to injure their physical health in the ways 
we are considering. 

There are American cities actually boasting of 
the clouds of smoke overhanging them as a sign 
of prosperity! It is, instead, testimony to being 
behind the times. The blacker the smoke, the 
greater economic waste, and waste of public 
health as well. It is entirely possible to have 
city air free from smoke. We must have suitable 
legislation, health boards with power to enforce 
these laws, and strong public opinion which 
mothers should help in creating to keep health 
boards up to their duties. Some useful facts are 
to be found in "The Cure for the Smoke Evil," 
by Herbert M. Wilson, Engineer in Charge, U.S. 
Bureau of Mines, publisht in The American City, 
June, 1911. The number also contains an article 
on baths. 

Clean streets and other surroundings are really 
problems in city housekeeping, and seriously 
affect housekeeping in homes and schools. Indif- 
ference, ignorance or incapacity in city cleaning 
waste an incalculable amount of labor, time, 
health, happiness of those who try to keep homes 
fit for growing citizens. 



104 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

May 

Schools and social centers 

Besides dirty, bad smelling streets, byways or 
yards, or lawless factory owners and incompetent 
officials who allow these things, there is also 
another item from outside that calls for foresight 
to avoid its complicating the difficulties of clean 
schoolhouses. 

It is becoming known under the propaganda 
for "The school as a social center" or "neighbor- 
hood center," or "Wider use of the school plant." 
It has so many good reasons for its development 
that unless thinking people keep certain essential 
rights of school children in mind, it will do much 
harm that can be avoided by reasonable foresight 
in the beginning. 

We have approximately one billion dollars 
invested in public school property, costing us 
annually over $341,000,000 to operate. We use 
this expensive department of the government not 
more than six hours daily for 155 days, about 930 
hours annually, less than a third of the time any 
ordinary shop is open. 

Many of our large business undertakings, 
especially those of public utility such as trans- 
oceanic or trans-continental carriers, employing 
eight-hour (or other) shifts of men, operate 
steadily twenty-four hours, 365 days in the year. 
Others lie idle Sundays only, or Sundays and 
nights. Others go on for eight, nine, ten hours, 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 105 

six and a half days, for fifty two weeks in the year. 
The contrast between the management of our 
immense pubhc investment in schools and that of 
private investments of even small amounts, or 
that of some other public departments is great. 

Idle buildings and idle rooms in buildings have 
contributed to the apparent reluctance in some in- 
stances with which appropriations for more build- 
ings or for running expenses have been granted. 
Thriftiness in these respects has seemed lacking. 
It is wasteful not only of money, but it is wasteful 
of opportunity to meet urgent public needs. 
Except church property, which is likewise idle 
the greater part of the time in spite of the increas- 
ing demand for better moral education, there is 
almost no investment in buildings lying unused 
so large a proportion of the year. It is worth 
more than passing notice that in these two costly 
institutions so many people seem to like getting 
so little for their money. The more holidays and 
the shorter hours, the better. 

These economic facts, together with the need 
of meeting places for the population not in day 
school, have led to the advocacy of using school 
buildings for other than day pupils. Evening 
schools and summer schools are becoming a part 
of public school work and belong regularly in the 
problem of school sanitation. 

There are, however, certain irregular meetings 
that have not so belonged — special political. 



106 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

scientific, educational, philanthropic and social 
meetings. Each succeeding year a larger number 
of these are held in school buildings. 

If such meetings do not detract from the regular 
educational uses of the buildings, they should be 
encouraged. But it is important to answer now, 
in the beginning of this innovation, the question, 
"Is the use of school buildings for other than day 
and evening schools in any way detrimental to 
these schools?" If it is so, in any way, the harm 
must be stopt. We have already to make right 
enough mistakes afiFecting children, of long stand- 
ing in the schools and in the community, without 
injuring them further by additional ones. Schools 
have been their special sanctum, the one place 
where professedly their rights are dominant. 

From my own limited experience the answer 
to the above question is undoubtedly yes. Such 
use of school buildings in some instances has been 
injurious in the matter of cleanliness (healthful- 
ness), altho it is not inevitable that it should be 
so. In widely separated localities I have found 
the following examples of gross violation of chil- 
dren's right to have clean rooms : 

A political meeting Saturday, with the building 
dirty and smelling of tobacco smoke Monday. 

A monthly meeting during several years, with 
rooms regularly saturated with tobacco smoke 
during the next day. 

A regular monthly banquet (after literary 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 107 

exercises), with fragments, crumbs and the odor 
of food in evidence at school the next day. 

Occasional lectures or entertainments, with the 
noise, dust and interruptions of preparation during 
school hours. Children's own entertainments 
create enough of this. 

Floors not swept after public meetings and in 
a condition such as no good housewife has at home. 

Dried expectorated tobacco juice. 

Dried sputum. 

These items lead one to wonder further how 
clean were the hands that left their memories 
on the children's furnishings. 

It should be said that there was no auditorium 
in any of these schools. The public used the 
classrooms. It would be absurd to claim that 
these instances are all that have occurred, and 
I doubt their rarity. Teachers understand that 
in these matters, as in the regular conduct of 
sanitary affairs, consistent and effective complain- 
ing on their part makes them disliked and so 
endangers their positions. Therefore they suffer 
the consequences with the children. 

These examples of conditions already resulting 
from public use of school buildings are a fair 
warning that we should provide a very much more 
intelligent and eflScient care of rooms than we have 
hitherto provided, and should do it before the 
children are subjected to the conditions, instead of 



108 MOTHERS' CLUBS AND 

after. They warn us that we may expect, if 
we do not do this, that the greater use of the school 
plant is to thwart our efforts in prevention of 
tuberculosis, nervous disorders and other forms 
of ill health that have been invited by public 
schools in the past. 

It is apparent that in this wider use of the school 
plant by the public we are liable to infringe on 
children's rights in the schools as we have in so 
many other places. We have built cities where 
they must live without safe spaces for play — the 
child's normal method of character and health 
building. We have churches with the children 
an after-thought in the hands of unstandardized 
volunteers, and very likely in a dim and unattrac- 
tive basement. Our theatres, literature, press and 
streets abound in evil lessons for children. The 
majority of homes provide food, hours, rooms and 
amusements for adult tastes, neglecting the things 
good for children. 

In view of these tendencies any slightest further 
overstepping of the rights of children in the single 
institution primarily dedicated to them is a matter 
for jealous watchfulness. Mothers' clubs should 
be trustworthy guardians to detect and prevent 
it. 

It is the greatest pity in the world that our 
thousands of empty, idle, untaxt church build- 
ings should not be used for all kinds of decent adult 
meetings. Our courthouses, the assembly and 



CLEAN SCHOOLHOUSES 109 

committee rooms of city hall and statehouse are 
public property, as are often the lecture rooms in 
libraries, museums, art galleries and the like. 
There are many places built for public use by 
adults that are unused evenings and Sundays. 
Use them. 



Ill 

SCHOOL JANITORS AND HEALTH 



"Every sanitary precaution necessary in private homes 
should be enforced many times more rigorously in school- 
houses." — "American Schoolhouses," Bulletin United States 
Bureau of Education 

October 

A billion dollars and all our children 

The motif in Prevention of School Fatigue is the 
imperative duty of cooperation between parents 
and schools in health details for children, espe- 
cially on the side of mothers. 

In the discussion of Clean Schoolhouses is 
urged the responsibility of mothers for the welfare 
of their children wherever they may be in the com- 
munity, with special reference to the housewifery 
in our schools. Mothers cannot safely shuffle off 
this God-given responsibility on teachers and 
political officials, nor can fathers, as is shown by 
our mortality and morbidity rates among children. 

Women, by general consent the "home makers" 
and "housekeepers," are guilty when shutting 
their eyes to and withholding their labors from 
111 



112 SCHOOL JANITORS 

any dirty, dusty, bad smelling, overheated school- 
room provided for our potential citizens and 
parents during the best waking hours of their 
most plastic years. 

Ignorance of the sanitary conditions surround- 
ing children is no excuse. Nature's laws of life 
and death do not recognize it as one, but continue 
on their way, blighting here, cutting off there, un- 
til parents shall learn the lessons whose tuition 
fees are paid in helpless lives, heartaches of guard- 
ians not equal to the trust, and society's loss of 
the service that might have been received in 
return for intelligent — cleaning of schoolhouses; 
such sweeping, dusting, scrubbing, heating, ven- 
tilating, disinfecting, deodorizing, as all good 
mothers know homes must have for health's sake. 

I first read the sentence heading this article 
when feeling particularly sceptical about mothers' 
clubs. I had just been (1912) in a city where I 
saw in its expensive ornamental normal school 
building a Chipt Rusted Cup chained to a water 
faucet, mixing salivas of all sorts of people in their 
drinking water; this being the instruction in 
practice to the supplementary mothers, the teach- 
ers, who are supposed to be trained there to 
guard safely the lives committed to their care. 

In the principal square of the city was a drink- 
ing fountain with a Chained Cup where I saw men 
and boys mixing poisons and diseases. All three 
school buildings that I visited had The Common 



AND HEALTH 113 

Cup also, with the usual other insanitary practices 
that go with this filthy one. 

And the boast of this municipality is its wealth. 

But the most discouraging part is still to tell. 
This city has had for several years two large and 
over twenty small mothers' clubs. Some of them 
know what Professor Davison's pictures show on 
The Common Cup, and know that all sanitary 
authorities as well as their own good sense con- 
sider it the nastiest habit we force on children 
(and the public), one of the usual causes of 
tuberculosis, syphilis, and every other disease 
whose germs lodge in throat and mouth. 

The clubs' programs are engaged with — well — 
Child Psychology, and neglect the elementary 
cleanliness that makes the good blood necessary 
for the brain to work rightly. They talk about 
Stories for Children, and Books for Children, and 
Play for Children, and give children The Common 
Cup that so often ends the need for stories and 
books and play. 

If they would spend on The Common Cup the 
energy and money given to getting out one year's 
program, they would justify their organizing, as 
the program alone — words without works — does 
not. To screw on a little bubble faucet in each 
school, not forgetting the pretentious normal, 
would save years of life — "monumentum aere 
perennius." One member replied to my letter 

of grief: "Mrs. is the wife of a member of 

8 



114 SCHOOL JANITORS 

the board of education, and is our chairman. She 
would be much offended. We have talked these 
things over among ourselves, and I think some- 
thing should be done, and perhaps might be if we 
tried." I wonder whether all the sins shifted on 
"politics" really belong. 

I wonder, too, when educators don't, and 
"politicians" (fathers under another name) don't, 
and mothers don't — I wonder whether trained 
janitors would. Trained nurses bring about 
many good things that doctors and politicians and 
parents did not accomplish before we had training 
schools. So do other trained workers in their 
own fields. 

We have more than a biUion dollars invested in 
school property, and we are just now spending 
about $70,000,000 annually in erecting new school- 
houses. The care of all this we put in the hands 
of men to whom we pay approximately $30,- 
000,000 annually, not one of whom (if, by 
chance there is one, it is the exception proving 
the rule) is trained in sanitary care of school 
premises before his first appointment. What 
they have is pickt up information, the kind of 
knowledge nurses had before training schools 
were establisht. What they do is not what good 
housekeepers allow in their housewifery, and is 
measured by our vital statistics and educational 
statistics. The oflBcials superintending them, 
also, are not trained for their duties. 



AND HEALTH 115 

But this is the least of the cost. We, knowing 
that schoolrooms do not come up to the standards 
of the best kept homes (and some of our best kept 
homes in respect to health are among poor people), 
knowing that dust, light, heat and air and disease 
germs are under caretakers with no special train- 
ing, few standards and little supervision, just 
as it was with our nurses sixty years ago — we 
place in these school homes the health of practi- 
cally every citizen at his most critical age — that 
of rapid physical growth, the age of laying founda- 
tions of intelligence and morality. 

We are frequently humiliated by learning how 
poorly our vital statistics compare with those of 
some European countries as well as our statistics 
of crime, illiteracy, degeneracy, alcoholism, and 
recent poverty. Among the lessons we find in 
those countries bearing on the concerns of physi- 
cal life is one that several educators and other 
travellers have commented on, that schoolhouses 
in Germany and elsewhere are much cleaner and 
more sanitary than they commonly are with 

us. 

We train and test for efficiency, in other words 
we standardize to some extent many other kinds 
of civil service in which not so much money and 
not nearly so much of national well-being is 
involved, and we do it in many kinds of private 
service. We pay janitors in many cities at 
higher rates than we pay elementary teachers who 



116 SCHOOL JANITORS 

spend so much time, money and effort on prepara- 
tion and are regularly tested. 

Attention has already been called to the death 
rate from tuberculosis among teachers being 
higher than the average of all other occupations. 
In the administration of teachers' retirement 
funds it is recently reported that only one-tenth 
retire because of age. The other nine-tenths give 
out because of physical and mental inefficiency, 
nervous troubles and similar forms of ill health. 

Among children there is a group of ailments 
long recognized as "school diseases" of which we 
have already spoken. They are chiefly anemia, 
nervous disorders, heart troubles and defective 
vision. It is now generally known that tuberculo- 
sis increases thru school years and after until in 
the twenties and thirties, the years of marriage 
and parenthood, it is the commonest cause of 
death. We have also referred to the fact that 
it is latent in very many children, and liable to 
become active on any slight depreciation of the 
general health. 

That conditions of schoolrooms promote these 
national and local mortality and morbidity rates 
has one proof in open air schools. Here, doing 
the same work under the same teachers, every 
delicate, anemic, tuberculous, nervous, backward 
(selected) child, with no exception, has improved 
in health, also in school work and often in grade, 
at a more rapid rate than children in regular 



AND HEALTH 117 

classrooms. These "occupational diseases" of 
schools are fostered by too high temperatures, 
too dry, stagnant, dusty indoor air. 



Novemher 

The great test 

One test of the quality of janitor's work is the 
health of teachers and children. There is another 
very sensitive measurement of their work and 
of the sanitary conditions of schools. 

Schools do not exist simply to turn out children 
from their grades, or fit them for college, or train 
them to be good money makers after leaving 
school. The true object — even if not yet gene- 
rally reahzed — is to make good mothers and 
fathers of better children. 

The largest part of our strenuous social efforts 
to lessen the world's misery is directed against 
the unfitness of parents. Some of this unfitness 
is poor health. Some is ignorance of healthful 
ways of living, or it is wilful disobedience to laws 
of health partly due to the tyranny of lifelong bad 
habits. 

The most sensitive measurement of the sanitary 
conditions of schoolrooms is the rate at which 
babies under one year of age die — what we call our 



118 SCHOOL JANITORS 

infant mortality rate. This country stands far 
ahead of other civiHzed countries in national 
wealth. It stands, also, very high in crimes 
against life. There is no country with such 
terrible records of industrial accidents and railway 
accidents; no country with such a rate of suicide 
and murder. Nearly half of the suicides that have 
occurred in the last fifty years have been in the 
last ten. In some years we are having about 
11,000 murders, the average is over 6,000 every 
year, and we convict less than two murderers in 
one hundred. Germany convicts ninety-five 
in every hundred, and has few such crimes in 
comparison with us. 

The lives lost in any celebrated battle of history 
were few compared with those destroyed annually 
by violence and by preventable diseases. This 
year will be the same. We anticipate it quietly. 
But if a battle at Lawrence, for example, in con- 
nection with the strike had killed — two — or ten, 
it, too, would go down in history. Some day we 
shall turn to the mortality records of our industrial 
and civic struggles with horror, for they eclipse 
those of war. 

Of all our crimes against life the worst is our 
infant mortality rate. By our most recent and 
most favorable estimate we are about one-third 
down the list of civilized countries that we lead 
by such a generous margin in wealth. Another 
estimates us twenty-second among the thirty-one. 



AND HEALTH 119 

and other experts in vital statistics give us other 
discreditable ranks. Our great wealth has not 
saved the lives of babies and children. 

Every patriotic man and woman and all who 
reverence the life in a baby that has survived 
thru generations vanishing into ages beyond our 
knowledge — a trust from the infinite — knows 
that we should be first in the list, and that there 
should at least be no guessing about our rank. 
We are the only civilized country that does not 
keep official records of the birth of its citizens. 

A few states and cities whose birth registration 
is accepted tentatively by the Bureau of the 
Census are required to come within only 10 per 
cent of the truth, while other countries are 
required to be within 5 per cent. 

One interesting — very interesting fact in con- 
nection with infant mortality rates as related 
to schoolhouse keeping, and to women's responsi- 
bility for children wherever they may be in the 
community and responsibility for those social 
evils that injure babies, is this : The eleven coun- 
tries where children are best cared for are the 
eleven where women have equal power with men 
in controlling governmental and social practices, 
thus being able to discharge their God-given 
responsibility. According to the international 
tables of vital statistics publisht by the Registrar- 
General of births, deaths and marriages in Eng- 
land and Wales the eleven countries with lowest 



120 SCHOOL JANITORS 

death rates of infants and children under five 
years of age are New Zealand, Norway, South 
Australia, Tasmania, Queensland, Sweden, Vic- 
toria, New South Wales, Denmark, Western 
Australia and Finland. 

This, interpreted, means that where women are 
clear thinking enough to do their part, and men 
fair minded enough to share the world's work on 
equally advantageous terms, child life is safer 
and humanity better. In all these eleven coun- 
tries some of the recognized causes of infant 
mortality are less. In several the use of alcoholic 
drinks is under very much better control than 
with us. Divorce statistics, the social evil and 
poverty are less in some; industrial conditions 
and education better regulated. In some health 
oflScers and other sanitary workers are much more 
often trained for their positions. 

We have nine states now (1912) with 3,000,000 
women having full citizenship's responsibility 
for children: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, 
Washington, California, Kansas, Arizona and 
Oregon. But their birth registration is not yet 
near enough to accuracy to be accepted even ten- 
tatively by the Bureau of the Census. 

More than twice as many babies born alive 
die annually as people at all ages from tuberculo- 
sis. In the last ten years approximately two 
million babies born alive have died under one year 
of age. Four milhon children under five years 



AND HEALTH 121 

of age have died in these ten years. Of the two 
milUon babies, one-third of the deaths occurred 
in the first month after birth. As many more 
probably occurred at and just before birth; while 
as many deaths probably occurred during the 
four months before birth as in the first nine months 
of the first year. 

These deaths before birth and within a month 
after are distinctly due to fathers and mothers who 
have not given their children enough vitality to 
survive. One exception to this statement would 
be those deaths due to murder of the child before 
it is born, whose number is not known, but is 
large. Another exception is deaths due to im- 
proper care of the new born. 

After the first month deaths are more likely to 
be due to bad care and to wrong environment, 
or to accidents, or to crime. If the sanitary con- 
ditions are so poor as to cause death, in so far 
as health ideas and habits have been wrongly 
formed at school, schools are responsible — such 
habits as becoming accustomed to dusty, dirty, 
badly ventilated, overheated rooms, and so having 
them at home. It is a cause of death for a baby 
to live in a too hot room, with perhaps steam and 
dust, and too much clothing on. 

And in so far as schools have promoted in future 
parents the "school diseases," anemia, nervous 
disorders, catarrhal and tuberculous conditions, 
by overheated, dusty, arid air (which will be bad 



122 SCHOOL JANITORS 

in other ways if bad in these), all which details 
are in the care of janitors, our infant mortality 
rate becomes an index of our school sanitation. 
It is, indeed, an index of civilization itself. If 
babies were well borti and well cared for their 
death rate would be almost negligible. This 
means that the infant mortality rate measures the 
intelligence, right living and health of fathers and 
mothers; the standards of sanitation and morals 
of communities and governments; the efficiency 
of physicians, health boards, educators — and 
janitors. Our measurement we have seen is 
poor. 



The Boston A.C.A. 

The first people in this country to appreciate 
the importance of cleanliness of schoolhouses 
enough to really study it, spending money, labor, 
time and intelligent, even expert effort on the 
details, were, so far as I can learn, educated 
"home makers" — the Boston Branch of the Asso- 
ciation of Collegiate Alumnae. In this, as in so 
many other vital concerns of homes and schools, 
Mrs. Ellen H. Richards was an inspiring guide, 
serving as a sanitary expert from the Massachu- 
setts Institute of Technology. 

The work was organized very thoughtfully and 
efficiently. The cooperation was secured of the 
mayor, the president of the school board, superin- 



AND HEALTH 123 

tendent of schools, supervisors and teachers, chief 
inspector of pubHc buildings in the state, chairman 
of the board of health, custodian of buildings 
and, besides Mrs. Richards, two other experts 
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 
S. Homer Woodbridge, professor of heating and 
ventilation, directed the technical investigations 
of heating and ventilating apparatus, and of 
plumbing, made by paid inspectors. It was 
volunteer work for the good of the children — and 
the nation. 

They systematicly investigated and took notes 
on several hundred details. This account will 
review only some of those directly concerned 
with janitors' work as it affects health. They did 
not take any one's word for any housewifery that 
they could learn by their own personal observa- 
tion. This is a very right policy, for rules are one 
thing, the methods of carrying them out in school 
housekeeping, as in one's own housekeeping, are 
quite another. Official replies to questionnaires 
are — official. 

Another strong point is that they did not drop 
the work after making their first report. In two 
years, after the city had expended the special 
appropriations amounting to about $400,000, as 
well as their regular annual appropriations for 
repairs, they took it up again with equal thoroness 
and reported on oversights — true housekeepers' 
system that all municipal sanitation needs. They 



124 SCHOOL JANITORS 

found a considerable portion of the appropriations 
had been misspent according to amateurs' ideas, 
instead of according to the advice of sanitary- 
experts — the real economy and effectiveness. 

The later reviews of the ground showed some 
improvements following each investigation. But 
Boston has not yet "arrived" in the matter of 
clean schoolhouses. There is still more for the 
"natural housekeepers " who have been scientificly 
trained in housewifery to do there and in every 
other city, or our tuberculosis and infant mortality 
rates would not be so high. Another good 
result was that their work being so sensibly done 
inspired other branches of the Collegiate Alumnse 
to study the schools in their cities in similar 
fashions, and their reports produced local effects 
of more or less value. 



December 

And Janitors' Rules 

One of the interesting discoveries made quite 
generally wherever the college women undertook 
this study was that the requirements for clean- 
liness in schoolhouses, which were sometimes, as 
in Boston, inadequate, were not lived up to. 

In Boston their report stated that while it was 



AND HEALTH 125 

provided that stairs and passageways be swept 
daily, and the rooms twice a week (imagine a home 
with a few score or hundred children swept that 
often), in over half the schools the halls were swept 
only twice a week instead of daily, in two it was 
done but once a week, and in one only once a 
month. 

Entries, stairs, rails and furnishings were to be 
dusted every morning; but it was found that 
classrooms were dusted less often than once a 
week by eight janitors, only twice a week by 
eighty, daily by teachers or pupils or janitors in 
fifty-two schools, and daily by janitors according 
to the rules in only forty-three of the 193 schools 
studied. 

There was a rule that desks, seats and wood- 
work be cleaned whenever necessary. Twenty- 
one janitors thought it was never necessary and 
had never done it; twenty -four had done it once; 
fifteen had done it rarely; twenty-one did it 
occasionally; twelve, twice a year; ten, oftener, 
while in sixty schools all such cleaning was done 
in the long vacations. 

Janitors' standards of housekeeping set more 
home standards and habits of cleanliness and 
healthful living thruout the country than any 
other one agency. It is chiefly violation of laws 
of cleanliness and health in schools, at home and 
in the community that kills children of any age. 
These housekeepers whose studies we are dis- 



126 SCHOOL JANITORS 

cussing, and who found that even poor rules 
(such as no good housekeeper would have) were 
not lived up to, had and have no power to use their 
housekeeping ability on this important problem 
for the good of the state that educated them. 
This is foolish economics. 

There were no rules (1895) requiring floors to 
be washt. From 9 to 50 years the floors had not 
been washt in 77 buildings! They were washt 
seldom in 12 buildings; once a year in 15; twice 
a year in 18; three times a year in 8; oftener 
than three times a year in 5. They were all 
floors so finisht as to permit washing — and invite 
it. Washing, as we have seen in Clean School- 
houses, is not the best treatment of floors with 
certain finishes that need other care. Whatever 
the finish, the text heading the beginning of this 
subject stands. 

Ten years later there were still no rules requiring 
floors washt, and the great majority of the floors 
were as one would expect. But in 1905 there was 
some improvement in requirements for sweeping, 
altho the quality of the sweeping was not held up 
to good housekeeping standards, and the new 
rules were not always obeyed. Schoolrooms not 
used for kindergartens, manual training, evening 
classes and lectures were still to be swept only 
twice a week; the others, daily; and all were to 
have fortnightly sweeping with sawdust wet with 
a solution of formaldehyde. The door knobs and 



AND HEALTH 127 

hand rails were to be washt twice a month with a 
solution of formaldehyde, and the seats and desks 
of all having a contagious disease were to be 
washt with a similar solution; all wood-work was 
required to be washt once or twice a year. 

These rules are the record of ten years' prog- 
ress on these points in school administration. 
They show a limited amount of interest and capa- 
city. Their requirements from the viewpoint 
of eflScient housekeepers are not sufficient either 
in quality or quantity. 

The parents who in those ten years lost probably 
ten thousand children under ten years of age who 
died unnecessarily, and the parents whose living 
children were hindered by altho surviving the 
causes that helpt destroy the ten thousand 
should regard anything less than excellence in 
school housekeeping a crime against childhood, 
motherhood and the state. The children are 
helpless, and the unfranchised mothers who are 
housekeepers and caretakers of children by com- 
mon consent. The statistics of ill health among 
teachers make all this quite as much a vital 
matter to them, all of whom are also politically 
powerless. 



128 SCHOOL JANITORS 

January 

Measuring dirt on windows 

Another study made by these women was of 
schoolhouse window cleaning. The requirement 
was that windows should be washt twice a year. 
The question they wisht to answer was whether 
under this rule there were any schools where dirt 
accumulated on the windows in sufficient quantity 
to diminish light to the point of injuring vision. 

With a photometer they measured the amount 
of hght entering before and after washing the 
windows on one side and on both sides. They 
arrived at interesting facts and practical conclu- 
sions. 

When this committee used a photometer to 
measure the amount of light coming thru windows 
in their study of housecleaning they were helping 
an important step forward for children. They 
were measuring with an instrument of precision, 
instead of expressing opinions which so often 
differ, with every one "a right to his own" — a 
dangerous maxim applied to cleanliness. 

We measure heat by thermometers, and that 
is the only accurate (when instruments are so) 
test of school housekeeping thus far adopted. It 
does not yet amount to as much as it should, for 
several reasons. 

Very recently a teacher informed me that for 
four weeks an hourly record of her thermostat had 
been kept by the children. It never read under 



AND HEALTH 129 

72°! It was frequently 76°. It appalls one to 
think of the "red tape" that maintains a tempera- 
ture at or above 72° to the second hour after the 
first has discovered it. Here were almost 140 
hours — one eighth of the school year — of "laying 
foundations " in education and in our tuberculosis 
rate, with the end of the overheating not yet in 
sight. Her city's "Rules for Janitors" requires 
70°, which is two higher than in up-to-date rules. 
Instruments of precision are waste of public 
funds if not lived up to, and if not kept accurate 
by occasional standardizing, as we regulate school 
clocks. 

For studying window cleaning the schools were 
groupt in three classes. Those of the best class 
were all situated on high ground where no struc- 
tures (or trees, I assume) shaded the windows. 
They were built according to modern ideas of 
maximum window area (one-fourth of floor area), 
with ventilating systems supplying "sufficient" 
pure air (30 cubic feet per minute for each person), 
and with the proper number of pupils in each 
room (forty-five). 

The buildings of the worst class were located 
where there was a great deal of smoke, dust and 
other impurities in the air. They were surrounded 
by tall buildings and by alleys not more than 
twenty feet wide. They were old, with insufficient 
window area, practically no ventilating systems, 
and gaslight was frequently used in the daytime. 



130 SCHOOL JANITORS 

Even today city authorities sometimes erect new 
buildings near walls, or allow walls to be placed 
so close that gaslight is needed in the day schools. 
Since fathers (the politicians) will do this, mothers 
owe it to their children to make matters better. 

The buildings of the intermediate class were 
surrounded by streets of medium width, and 
buildings whose height averaged less than the 
height of the school building, on one side perhaps 
higher, on the other much lower. Their window 
area was somewhat less than it should be; the 
ventilation "fair" (a matter of opinion, I suppose) ; 
smoke and other impurities in the air of the neigh- 
borhood were "present in average quantities." 

The tests were made on dull, overcast days when 
the intensity of light was quite constant. The 
poor light of such days must be provided against 
in schoolhouse construction. They measured the 
light in rooms with different exposures in each 
building, before the windows were washt, after 
washing them on the inside, and after washing 
them on both sides. 

In the best buildings they found that the light 
was about 4 per cent stronger after washing 
windows on the inside; and after washing them 
on both sides it was about 2 per cent better than 
that. It varied a little of course between different 
rooms. 

In the worst buildings they found that before 
washing the windows the light measured one- 



AND HEALTH 131 

twelfth to one-nineteenth as much as that in the 
best buildings. It gained 21 per cent, or there- 
abouts, after washing on the inside, and gained 
about 6 per cent more after washing on both 
sides. One room gained 33.3 per cent after the 
windows were washt on both sides. 

Try to follow in imagination the logical steps 
from the compulsory law taking children away 
from their parents into rooms with one-fifth to 
one-third of the light cut off by dirt on windows 
which at their best give only one-tenth to one- 
seventeenth the amount of light thought by 
experts to be desirable for the best buildings; 
follow on in thought to the listlessness, headaches, 
loss of grades — "backwardness" — that we dis- 
cust in Prevention of School Fatigue; and then on 
to perhaps the career of " Weary Willies " or worse, 
or to useful citizens forever hampered morally and 
mentally by imperfect vision, unless they happen 
to discover that they need glasses. No one 
wants to spend money on glasses or to be bothered 
with them even when old age is a legitimate 
reason. There is also the fact that good light 
is essential for general health, including health of 
the nervous system. 

The intensity of light before washing windows 
in the intermediate class of buildings measured 
about one-half that in the best group, and gained 
more than twice as much as they gained after 
washing on the inside, and nearly twice as much 



132 SCHOOL JANITORS 

after washing on both sides. That is, the windows 
of the intermediate and worst classes were much 
dirtier both outside and inside, needing washing 
oftener. 

Their measurements showed also that in the 
same building some rooms must have their 
windows washt oftener than others to maintain 
sufficient illumination for reading without eye- 
strain. It is with windows as with management 
of children, "wholesale" rules treating all of a 
group alike, do not produce the results we are 
after. 

In the best class dirt does not accumulate 
on windows enough to make the reduction of 
light of any importance. Yet, because they are 
"prominent" buildings, they almost always have 
more and better janitor service. 

It was found that the inside cleaning makes 
a much greater improvement than the outside 
cleaning, particularly in buildings with poor 
ventilation. The moisture and organic material 
given off from children, with the dust of the 
rooms and impurities of city air, make a deposit 
on walls and windows. This helps to create 
smells as well as to diminish light. A good 
ventilating system would have sufficient air cur- 
rents to sweep some of this out of doors, if windows 
and flues were used effectively. 

They could not remove all, for even out of doors 
in smoky districts, as the coke burning regions 



AND HEALTH 133 

of Pennsylvania, or as in large manufacturing 
cities, vegetation is covered with a deposit that 
frequently rain does not wash ofiF. This, with the 
sulphuric acid in smoky air, prevents or greatly 
hinders school gardens, home gardens, and the 
beauties of field and forest. In London they are 
studying how to save the stones of which West- 
minster Cathedral is built from this destructive 
action whose effects are already serious. Just 
where people and children come in is another 
story. 

In schoolrooms where the deposit can be washt 
from windows and scraped from walls, the condi- 
tions blight children and teachers — eventually the 
nation that compels or permits them. Undoubt- 
edly such schoolroom air helps cause the dis- 
colored noduled lungs found at autopsies which 
are spoken of in another connection. Since in 
the open air this unwholesomeness exists, evidently 
to establish good school ventilation is not the 
whole problem. Another step is to enact and 
enforce legislation compelling captains of indus- 
tries to cease contaminating the atmosphere with 
smoke and other impurities that damage public 
health quite as definitely as allowing sewage to 
escape into the common water supply. 

Two weeks after all the windows had been 
washt on both sides the light was measured 
again. It was found that windows in the inter- 
mediate class had grown three times dirtier than 



134 SCHOOL JANITORS 

those in the best; while windows in the worst 
class had grown six times dirtier. Should this 
suggest a rule that janitors wash windows in the 
dirtiest, darkest rooms six times oftener than in 
the brightest and best ventilated, and three 
times oftener in the average rooms? 



February 

And "dipping" 

In Boston at that time it cost over $11,000 to 
wash all the windows twice a year, this investigat- 
ing committee reported. It must cost more now. 
This expense for light reminds me of Mark Twain's 
"Truth is the most precious thing in the world, 
and therefore we must be very economical in the 
use of it." We have been economizing in both 
kinds of "precious" light — physical light as well 
as mental light. 

Should windows acquiring a certain amount 
of dirt, say six times more quickly than others, 
be washt six times oftener? This means six 
times the cost to the city, or some other propor- 
tion that would annually amount to several 
thousand dollars in the larger cities. 

To answer yes would be in accordance with the 
philosophy of political administration in numerous 



AND HEALTH 135 

directions. For example, we derive an income 
("license fees") from the sale of intoxicants which 
we spend many times over in "curing, " "prevent- 
ing," "punishing" the logical results. We allow 
"red light" neighborhoods and unsanitary housing 
conditions yielding good percentage on the invest- 
ment (or they would not flourish so generally), 
and we spend the resulting income, taxes, fines, 
hush monies, for reformatories, police, courts, 
lawyers and judges. I speak only of the financial 
waste in these illustrations of many similar fool- 
ishnesses, leaving human waste to recollection and 
to study of the volumes of the Census. 

There is a story going of a test for feeble-minded- 
ness used in a hospital : After turning on the water 
in a bathtub, the patient is given a dipper and 
told to empty it. Those who are sufficiently 
intelligent begin by shutting off the water, the 
others only dip. 

We desperately need intelligence equal to find- 
ing out and shutting off the cause of the wrongs, 
immorality and ill health we are trying to get 
rid of by merely dipping. Spending money on 
extra window washings would be merely dipping, 
for these women studying conditions had found 
out that bad ventilation, befouled city atmos- 
phere, over-crowding and bad building were the 
cause of the bad illumination, as well as of other 
serious menaces to health. 

That politicians neglect the sanitation of schools 



136 SCHOOL JANITORS 

is no excuse for mothers doing so. Society 
insists that they are the caretakers of children. 
The Creator holds them so with his laws of birth, 
life and death. Housekeeping belongs to woman 
— and she shirks. 

Here is the result of the shirking by women in 
Michigan. The State Board of Health has 
recently publisht some facts from a study of 
tuberculosis among teachers. Michigan ought 
to be one of our healthiest states, with no great 
cities and their abnormal crowding to depreciate 
vital statistics. 

Of the deaths between twenty-five and thirty- 
four years of age among all people in Michigan 
during certain years, one quarter (25.8 per cent) 
was due to tuberculosis; but among teachers it 
was over one-half (52.4 per cent). Among all 
ages only one-eleventh (9.4 per cent) of the 
general death rate was due to tuberculosis, but 
among teachers the rate was three times greater 
(27.6 per cent). 

It is probably as bad if not worse in each state 
where there is a mothers' club and teachers' 
association, for the Michigan figures reflect the 
statistics of the Bureau of the Census for the 
whole country concerning teachers and tuberculo- 
sis. The same conditions that invite it in teachers 
invite it in their pupils. Teachers (mostly 
women) and mothers are as helpless to control 
this sort of housekeeping as are the children. 



AND HEALTH 137 

They are all clast together politically, as idiots, 
minors, women, criminals, etc., and yet the state 
has put millions of dollars into the education of 
these teachers and mothers whom it refuses 
authority in their own special business, care of 
children and housewifery. 

Janitors wholly untrained in sanitary house- 
keeping, supervisors and politicians also untrained, 
make these conditions inviting disease and death 
for those who are at their mercy poUtically and 
legally. Why? Because so many women are 
willing to let it be so. That is the chief reason. 

The standards of mothers have not kept pace 
with the needs of the century. The good mothers 
of one hundred or two hundred years ago under- 
stood their duties more in accordance with the 
needs of children, especially with that need for 
mothers' protection as well as fathers' in all the 
interests of youth. 

The old house with fertile acres around it — 
"home" — furnisht food, shelter, work, recreation, 
education, under the supervision of the mother 
quite as much as of the father. There were weak 
points, but not those requiring juvenile and divorce 
courts, organized charities and regiments of social 
workers. These new institutions betray the 
weaknesses in mothers and fathers — children's 
needs are the same. I am reminded of a protest- 
ing mother: "Oh, Doctor, castor oil is such 
an old-fashioned thing for the baby!" "And, 



138 SCHOOL JANITORS 

Madam, babies are very old-fashioned things, 
too." 

Youth needs, and has a right to it to-day 
exactly as of old, mothers' as well as fathers' con- 
trol of their work-places, whether factory, shop, 
oflSce; of their place of education and places of 
entertainment, whether theatre, show or rink; and 
of their comings and goings between these inter- 
ests, the city streets — formerly all a part of home. 

The house for eating, sleeping and waiting for 
school hours, work hours, outside fun, does not 
correspond to the original conception of home, 
which was "village" or "estate" (on which 
villages would be). Webster gives this meaning 
as obsolete, and gives the first modern synonym 
of home, "tenement." With tenements for homes 
("the mothers' place") have come juvenile courts 
and all the other methods of "dipping." 

We must restore the true conception of home, 
the house and its sustaining environment all under 
mothers' as well as fathers' control for the good of the 
children. The twentieth century city is the 
twentieth century home. Its details affect chil- 
dren after the same old-fashioned laws. Mothers 
are as essential as fathers in managing homes. 

Since motherhood implies nourishing and pro- 
tecting after birth, mothers even more than 
fathers are responsible for allowing caretakers 
to maintain school conditions injurious to chil- 
dren's and teachers' health to the extent that 



AND HEALTH 139 

statistics show existing and also show preventable. 
That men are not doing well this ages long wo- 
man's work of housekeeping, home making, care 
of children, willing tho they are to shoulder it 
all, is because they cannot today any more than 
in the days when mothers willingly attended to it. 
Between the woman's shirking and the man's 
inability pupils and teachers are helpless in their 
roles inviting tuberculosis, infant mortality, and 
other vital rates disgracing us among the peoples 
of the world. 

In addition to this study of lighting and of 
removal of dirt and dust made by the Boston 
women, they had studies also made of school 
dust bacteria. Only occasional contagious disease 
germs are found in dust, as we have already 
learned, drying and light killing most of these 
bacteria very soon. Pus forming germs however 
are in great abundance. Their studies of dust 
were chiefly valuable as suggesting the amount 
of dirt. They found that after sweeping with 
damp sawdust, the numbers of micro-organisms 
were very little reduced, except as the quantity 
of dust removed carried them with it; but when 
the sawdust was moistened with a solution of 
formaldehyde nearly all bacteria were destroyed 
in cultures made from the floor dust immediately 
after. 

They investigated oil dust layers, the kerosene 
dustless broom of which we have spoken, and 



140 SCHOOL JANITORS 

vacuum cleaning; door mats and shoe brushes. 
They measured air currents in ventilating shafts 
with an anemometer, another pioneer use of an 
instrument of precision in school sanitation. In 
sixteen buildings they found the ventilating shaft 
ended in the attic, which in some cases was kept 
closed, or it connected with the outer air only 
thru ventilators in the roof. In some cases the 
ventilating shafts from water-closets and from 
classrooms ended out of doors at the same point, 
so that when there was a back draft into the room, 
perhaps caused by the wind, it carried with it the 
foul air from sanitaries. They re-discovered 126 
schools whose sanitaries had been repeatedly con- 
demned by the city board of health, with recom- 
mendations that they be abolisht. 

They investigated playgrounds, also, and among 
various items found 136 with 346 cesspools, 9 
cesspools having no sewer connection, 29 being 
for sewage, the others for surface water; all were 
cleaned very irregularly, only 7 as often as twice 
a year, and 10 schools reported they were never 
cleaned. 

They investigated fire escapes and found 
equally reckless indifference to the safety of 
children. But these are "other stories," not 
janitors' work. They are significant of what 
awaits mothers who look out for their children's 
welfare, for conditions corresponding to these are 
found wherever any sanitary study has been 
undertaken. 



AND HEALTH 141 

They had an exhibit showing local conditions, 
data collected from other cities, standards of 
sanitation, apparatus and methods, with many 
more items. It was an extremely interesting 
occasion, instructive and stimulating as well; the 
first and thus far the only school housecleaning 
exhibit in the country. Mothers' clubs with the 
assistance of capable workers can render a very 
great service that is waiting for some one to per- 
form in their community, if they make honest 
studies of school cleanliness and bring them to 
pubhc attention. 

The State Commissioner of Health of Pennsyl- 
vania inspected 3,572 country schools during this 
last school year (1911-1912), and reports only 536 
in a sanitary condition. There are 3,036 — more 
than five-sixths of the inspected schools — pro- 
nounced unsanitary. Mothers are all around each 
of these schools sending their children to them — 
and doing nothing about these things. If they 
were doing what they should, and doing it earn- 
estly, the unsanitary conditions certainly would not 
have waited to be discovered by an official investi- 
gator from outside the community. Other equally 
serious reports of the sanitary conditions of other 
groups of schools are to be found in the annual 
reports of the Commissioner for 1907, 1908, 1909, 
and in 1910 when publisht. The schools in 
Pennsylvania are no worse than in other states. 
Pennsylvania has the advantage of a Department 



142 SCHOOL JANITORS 

of Health that understands this is one of the most 
fundamental matters in public health work. 



March 

Another study of schoolrooms 

This persistent and intelligent study by college 
women in Boston, and their frank admission that 
Boston's methods were especially poor as com- 
pared with the methods officially reported in 
several hundred schools in a score of large cities 
stimulated, as already said, similar studies within 
those ten years. With no exception thruout 
the country the ignorance and indifference of 
officials and parents concerning children's sanitary 
surroundings at school were confirmed. 

"Officially reported" — reports on cleanliness 
and sanitation, like reports on classwork and 
finances, unless details are standardized by 
accurate measurements and records, are of little 
value. We have seen that official rules are not 
lived up to, a fact that official reports do not make 
known, except official reports of medical inspec- 
tors and nurses, of health officials and our Bureau 
of the Census, all of which tell us sad facts of 
preventable ill health and death among school 
children. 



AND HEALTH 143 

Regular observations, measurements and rec- 
ords are the only reliable basis for school sani- 
tation, standardizing physical conditions as we 
are beginning to standardize mental acquire- 
ments, and have long standardized details involv- 
ing money interests. It is in this direction, 
measuring sanitary details by instruments of 
precision and keeping records, that we are now 
growing. 

A study was recently made of a large school in 
the neighborhood of a great university from which 
this kind of wisdom is at last beginning to over- 
flow. It was made by one of the students in its 
college of education. There are universities with- 
out enough such wisdom to overflow, if one may 
judge from the conditions of schoolhouses in their 
shadow. There is always at hand abundance of 
"clinical material" in school sanitation for every 
institution training teachers. Mothers' clubs 
must ask them, and must keep on asking them 
until the results wanted are secured, for it does 
them good, as well as the unsanitary schools, when 
they come out of their laboratories and round 
tables and do real things, adapting scientific 
and theoretic studies to the needs of the commu- 
nity that sustains them. 

This study began with grounds and buildings, 
and among other things found that trees shaded 
the windows cutting off necessary illumination, 
and that the school was directly in the path of 



144 SCHOOL JANITORS 

the prevailing wind bringing disagreeable odors 
from a gas plant. No shrewd citizen would build 
even a little $5,000 home for himself and children 
in such a location, nor permit the erection of a 
gas plant to become a nuisance. But for many 
years those citizens had thought it good enough 
for children and teachers — ^helpless to escape and 
disciplined for complaining. 

Many details of heating and ventilating were 
bad. One discovery was literally amazing. There 
was found an unknown "aspirating chimney". 
Years before, in renewing the heating apparatus, 
flues for the outlet of foul air had been opened 
from each room into a central chimney, and a 
small stove placed in the basement at the bottom 
of the chimney. 

The heat from the stove sweeping up thru such 
a chimney to escape at the top sucks air from the 
rooms, carrying off some bad air, drawing heat 
into the rooms from registers, and creating air 
currents that make rooms much more comfortable. 
The principal and janitor, and the unsalaried 
school officials knew nothing of this good help 
to ventilation which taxpayers' money had 
provided, there had never been a fire in the stove, 
and what the teachers and children endured will 
be learned when the measurements are told. 

There was absolutely no reasonable excuse for 
this neglect. It was biologicly criminal; but 
civil laws do not make it so, as they do not make 



AND HEALTH 145 

many other slow injuries of children with bad air. 
They are just beginning to take up the slow 
poisonings of workers by phosphorus and lead in 
certain occupations. After a while the children's 
turn will come, perhaps not today's children in 
which some of us are interested; they will go the 
way of the others, taking chances with tuberculo- 
sis, anemia and all the rest. The as yet unborn 
children that survive to school days will have 
good housekeeping at school, if mothers say so, and 
stick to it. 

A member of a mothers' club that is working on 
school housecleaning matters tells me that they 
also have found the same kind of unused ventilat- 
ing chimney in one of their schools. We may 
justly blame principals, janitors and other city 
officials ; but in the end, however, it is the indiffer- 
ence, and negUgence of fathers and mothers, es- 
pecially mothers, and most especially organized 
mothers in these two cities, for one is in the 
state of New York where women have tax- 
paying and school suffrage; while the other is 
in Massachusetts where women have school 
suffrage. That the New York condition was 
discovered and promptly remedied was due to a 
university student — not to the interested mother 
of any pupil in the school; the Massachusetts flue 
is waiting for something to turn up. 

An anemometer is a Uttle wheel so constructed 
as to whirl in currents of air. There is a scale 
10 



146 SCHOOL JANITORS 

to measure the rate of whirling, that is, the 
strength of the current of air. This student 
found that the anemometer did not turn in any 
of the foul air flues — there was no air going out. 
Any ventilating flue can be tested by an anemome- 
ter. It does not cost much, and any club can 
provide one for the use of its schools. 

School officials are quite apt to point out their 
flues for ventilation, and quite as apt not to 
know whether there are any air currents or suffi- 
cient air currents passing thru them. The 
currents may be by accident inward instead of 
outward. This was sometimes the case in a 
certain very expensive "system of ventilation" 
that was installed in many schools a few years ago. 
The system ventilated the water-closets and rooms 
thru the same or connecting flues, and when things 
were not just right down below or up above the 
current blew into the rooms instead of out! 

That system is gone by, and we are spending 
more hundreds of thousands on others that require 
windows to be "hermetically sealed." But we are 
getting around that by all teachers in a building 
agreeing to open their windows at exactly the 
same moment every hour for five minutes, all 
flushing out their rooms together (thus not up- 
setting the direction of air currents in the "sys- 
tem" to the disadvantage of certain rooms) — 
flushing with the kind of air we were given to 
breathe all the time. 



AND HEALTH 147 

This is one step in advance. Open air rooms is 
another. The "just as good" air reminds one 
of the patent medicines that people pay many 
times more for than they would pay for the same 
drugs put up by the pharmacist, and that are 
claimed to be "just as good" as the real thing 
which they often are not. 

A very expensive instrument, requiring delicate 
handling, was used to measure the carbon dioxid 
in the air of these rooms, the Pettersson-Palm- 
qvist apparatus. When school opened there was 
the proper amount of carbon dioxid in the air, 4 
parts of the gas in 10,000 parts of air, as out of 
doors. Several measurements at different hours 
showed that it increast very rapidly, in a few 
minutes being 10 parts, instead of 4, and growing 
until it was 20 or 24 or even 29 parts. Different 
rooms measured differently. These high tests 
mean that pupils breathed nearly all day what is 
called "very bad air" technically by engineers. 
It is not the carbon dioxid that does the harm; 
but it is the conditions that so much carbon 
dioxid means. 

One thing it shows is that there are no air 
currents blowing out stale air and blowing in 
fresh. All the air breathed, or at least very much 
of it, hes stagnant to be breathed again. That 
accounts for the bad smells in all such rooms, odors 
from the breath, mouth, clothing and bodies. 
We do not yet know all about the effects of this 
rebreathed air on children during school years. 



148 SCHOOL JANITORS 

Professor C.-E. A. Winslow, in Proceedings of 
the National Education Association, 1911, which the 
public library or some teacher has in every com- 
munity, tells of experiments proving the untruth 
of the old idea that carbon dioxid is poisonous in 
our rooms; proving that it never can accumulate 
in an ordinary room in sufficient quantity to do 
harm. Experiments were tried where the gas was 
sixty times more than in outside air, but so long as 
the chamber was cool there was no discomfort, and 
the people experimented on continued with their 
work. 

When the temperature got up in the seventies 
and eighties, where it very often is in our schools, 
then the discomfort was great, being shown by 
flusht and perspiring faces and great restlessness. 
When the electric fan was started, blowing over 
and cooling them, they were at once comfortable 
again altho the air was just as hot and contained 
just as much carbon dioxid and other products of 
breathing. They continued their work for several 
days under these conditions, but it is not proved 
that children could grow into healthy adults with 
that kind of atmosphere. It is proved by these 
and other experiments that the high temperatures 
and stagnant air in our schools have much to do 
with ill health and discomfort; that it is not the 
carbon dioxid, but the conditions that it indicates 
that are harmful. 

Disease germs that have gained entrance to the 



AND HEALTH 149 

body are destroyed by protective cells in the blood, 
phagocytes, and in other ways. The healthier 
the child, the more of the phagocytes. One of 
the chief functions of the skin and of the mucous 
membrane lining nose, throat and bronchial tubes, 
is to prevent germs getting in. When these 
defenders are relaxt (flusht and perspiring) in 
temperatures of 70° to 85°, as in schoolrooms, two 
dangers result; the vital processes inside the 
body controlling phagocytes are lessened because 
so much of the blood is in the skin, and the tonic 
contraction of the skin for protective purposes is 
diminisht. 

The skin toned up by the morning dash of cold 
water, by cool rooms and by exercise helps much 
to prevent ill health and disease. Flabby, easily 
chilled because of "coddling" in warmth, it is a 
part of the "softness" dreaded by every thorobred 
English boy. "Am I soft. Mother.?" fell from the 
roof of the garden house. Keener dismay never 
rang in any voice of nine. Mother, after due 
reflection on the serious question, sent up a 
reassuring "No, Jack" — and the tension was 
relieved. 

There are always more germs of contagious 
diseases in a roomful of people. The warmer 
the room, the less their resistance for the reasons 
we have given. It is most important, therefore, 
that schoolrooms be kept scrupulously clean and 
at the safer temperature of the 60's, for these 



150 SCHOOL JANITORS 

reasons as well as because the brain works easier 
and better with its due supply of blood not 
diverted to the skin. Some teachers have their 
rooms disconnected from the heating apparatus, 
so that they can use their windows as they please, 
getting all the heat they need from corridors. The 
pupils become restless and indifferent when by 
accident registers are left open. Their red cheeks 
and bright eager faces during school hours is a 
lesson to housekeepers. 

A few days ago I was on the Twentieth Century 
Limited from Boston to Albany, the kind of train 
where one pays extra fare for elegance or comfort, 
I have never been sure which. On this occasion 
the heat was stijfling, I consulted a thermometer 
— as we usually do not find one, probably that 
is one of the reasons for extra fare — and found it 
74°. Summoning my courage and the fact, I 
protested to the Pullman porter. He started an 
electric fan in my direction, and I was comforta- 
ble, altho with scruples against being so for the 
temperature of the air was no lower and it was no 
"fresher." But I was entirely comfortable until 
he stopt the fan about quarter of an hour before 
my station when the air seemed worse than before. 



AND HEALTH 151 

April 

Measuring health conditions 

We are surrounded by what some one has called 
an "aerial blanket" — the layer of air next the 
skin warmed and moistened by heat and evapora- 
tion from it. The longer the blanket Ues there 
the warmer and moister it becomes, nearing the 
temperature of the body (98.8°) which is "hot 
weather." The warmer the body and its aerial 
blanket become, the more the body perspires, as 
that is one way its temperature is kept down, the 
evaporation of perspiration cooling the body. 
But if the air is already moist so that perspiration 
does not dry off quickly the aerial blanket becomes 
almost as moist as the skin. The blanket being 
as warm and moist as the skin, the heat contin- 
ually being produced in the body accumulates, the 
blood vessels of the skin dilate that more coohng 
may go on thru the skin, leaving the heart and 
brain with much less blood, therefore their work is 
much harder, and all the processes of hfe become 
more difficult; sometimes a person faints for this 
reason. But fainting is extreme. The usual 
result of hot rooms is to make work more exhaust- 
ing, the action of heart and brain being more 
difficult because the blood is in the skin to keep the 
temperature from fever conditions. 

On a hot damp breezeless day in August we are 
uncomifortable for the same reason. The blanket 
may become warmer and moister than the skin, 



152 SCHOOL JANITORS 

with no wind to blow it off and to bring a fresher 
blanket. We use fans instead, and avoid heavy 
mental work. 

The skin is the great temperature regulator of 
the body, ehminating waste with its perspiration, 
and keeping its sense of touch in working order, 
which means keeping a large part — a very large 
part of the nervous system "fit," as is realized 
when one recalls the "lacelike model" in Preven- 
tion of School Fatigue. The nervous system con- 
trols our general health, so that the skin and its 
functions are very important for an efficient life. 

As the nerve endings in the eyes need light 
waves in order that eyes may see, and in the ears 
need sound waves in order to hear, so, we are 
finding out, the nerve endings in the skin need 
motion waves — air motion, and many other kinds 
— in order to keep in health. Without motion of 
many kinds to stimulate its nerve endings, it 
loses its vitality and so affects the health, as, 
without light, eyes lose power of vision, and as 
ears must have sounds to keep in normal condi- 
tion. 

A child rolhng on the brown bed of needles un- 
der Adirondack pines watcht thru summer days 
the rippling waves of heat rising from the lawn 
sloping toward the sun, and made a Httle "theory 
of what life is" — that it is motion, of many kinds 
but always motion; the motion of wind, water, 
heat, light, sound, electricity and finally, motion 



AND HEALTH 153 

in protoplasm and all living things, for in the 
country school the children had these every day 
events because they are so much more fascinating 
than story telling. Finally protoplasm, the 
theory had it, in a universe of motion, living by its 
own chemical motions resulting in energies, muscu- 
lar, mental and others. 

The little theory that the same phenomenon 
has started in other young minds was elaborated 
into the child's teens, when it disappeared in 
subconsciousness, which means it was forgotten. 
The child was not so far out of the way it seems, 
now that we find motion in schoolroom air is 
as important as cool temperature and sufficient 
humidity. The object of ventilation being to 
make house air like outdoor air, we must supply 
in it this bombardment of tiny waves of all sorts 
of energies coming from infinite space, to keep the 
sensory and other functions in health. All this 
motion of open air is so diminisht by walls that 
feelings stagnate, vitality is lessened, and there- 
fore it must be supplied or restored ; hence electric 
fans and other devices to keep air in motion, as 
well as devices for right temperatures and humid- 
ity. 

The question may yet arise whether fan waves 
are " just as good " as outdoor waves ; and 
whether there are still other qualities in open air 
needed for indoor air and health. Dr. Leonard 
Hill has an interesting article on "Stuffy Rooms" 



154 SCHOOL JANITORS 

in Popular Science Monthly, October, 1912, 
explaining the reasons for cool rooms with suffi- 
cient humidity and motion in the air. We are not 
sure of any "system" in the long run. We are 
entirely sure of open air. We should not pay for 
systems with children's lives, when "the real 
thing" can be had — and so much else besides — by 
opening windows or going out of doors. 

In the school building which the university 
student examined he measured the humidity with 
a "whirling wet-dry bulb thermometer," some- 
thing mothers can supply for their children's 
school as a Christmas present, or valentine; some- 
thing we shall possibly use in our homes as com- 
monly as the ordinary dry bulb thermometer. 
Another name for it is hygrometer, because it 
measures the moisture in the air. There are 
several kinds of hygrometers, this being the one 
used and recommended by the United States 
Weather Bureau. 

It consists of two thermometers fastened to a 
handle, one bulb wrapt with a wet cloth. After 
whirling them by the handle for a few minutes 
they are read. The dry bulb thermometer reads 
as before, the temperature of the room; the 
evaporation from the cloth has cooled the other, 
so that it reads lower, according to the amount of 
evaporation that has taken place, which depends 
on the amount of humidity already in the air. 
The difference between the two readings on a 



AND HEALTH 155 

basis of the dry bulb reading is compared with 
tables issued by the Weather Bureau (Bulletin No. 
235), and gives the "relative humidity" that we 
are wishing to regulate in living rooms for health's 
sake. 

The student found the relative humidity in the 
schoolrooms tested (on rainy days when it would 
be supposed to be high) was from 20 to 30 per cent. 
This means that the air breathed by the children 
held only one-fifth (20 per cent) of what it could 
hold at that same temperature. This is said to be 
worse than any desert where vegetation never 
grows. Our schools all over the country with few 
exceptions are as arid as this in the cold months 
when artificial heat is used and direct open air 
is shut out. The normal relative humidity of 
open air at a temperature between 50° and 70° is 
about 60 per cent. 

The parcht air irritates respiratory passages 
in its excessive demand for moisture. This helps 
produce catarrh of nose, throat and bronchial 
tubes, thus putting their mucous membrane 
linings in the right condition, helpt on by school 
dust, for growth of various sorts of micro-organ- 
isms, such as pus cells and tubercle bacilH. It 
probably injures in other ways not well under- 
stood. 

If any of these children should undertake that 
most delightful and profitable occupation, school 
gardening, and should go for their seeds to the 



156 SCHOOL JANITORS 

shop I visited this morning, they would be quite 
probably served by the same clerk. He appears 
in an advanced stage of tuberculosis, dispensing 
its seeds gratis to the crowd of customers. He 
would cough in the children's faces as he coughed 
in mine a score of times. The tubercle bacilli 
on the fine invisible droplets that always fly from 
the mouth in sneezing, coughing and energetic 
speaking would be breathed and swallowed by the 
children already prepared to "take" them by 
badly ventilated schoolrooms. This is part of 
our unsystematic and shortsighted campaign 
against tuberculosis that is not reducing its death 
rate any faster, sometimes not as fast as the 
general death rate is diminishing. It is "penny 
wise" to care for a few already tuberculous, and 
"pound foolish" to continue practices lessening 
the resistance of children, particularly in the 
schools — the most profoundly influential of any 
government's institutions. 

This mouth spray or shower of droplets is 
carried by air currents in every direction around 
a person for distances of even ten or fifteen feet. 
Some people scatter it more than others. It 
usually settles to the floor in ten or twenty 
minutes. The shower is so thin, and for other 
reasons, investigators sometimes find very few, or 
none of the special germs for which they search. 
But they have found near consumptive coughers 
enough to prove this a matter of importance. 



AND HEALTH 157 

The danger from swallowing disease germs in 
fresh saliva on cups is probably greater than from 
this scattering in the air. There is, however, 
when near a person great danger of inhaling them 
or swallowing them from the saliva droplets 
either while in the air or after they have settled 
on food or other object near the cough or sneeze. 
It is imperative that children (and everyone else) 
cover their mouths with a handkerchief (or hand 
at least, which then needs washing) to catch this 
spray when sneezing and coughing. 

Professor Winslow states that experimenters 
who are studying mouth droplets advise at least 
forty inches of space between the heads of workers 
in factories and offices. The heads of children in 
assembly and class rooms are often nearer than 
this. I am never in a roomful of school children 
without seeing many even "nice" ones coughing 
"all over" their neighbors. 

One wonders what teachers and parents do with 
their opportunities for correcting the nasty habit. 
In a recitation on physiology and hygiene that 
I saw last winter in a famous school from which 
many preachments go out about hygiene, the boys 
and girls with colds (and without), with hardly 
three feet between their heads, coughed freely in 
every direction while they talked about germs on 
long skirts ! 

It would aid mightily to improve our vital 
statistics if mothers — the home makers — would 



158 SCHOOL JANITORS 

keep suitable school homes, and teach children to 
cover their mouths and turn from others when they 
cough, as this salesman's mother and teachers had 
failed to do. 

The student investigator studied the lighting 
of the rooms, but not with a photometer as was 
done at Boston. He found the building well 
arranged for illumination. His report criticized 
teachers for not adjusting shades properly; 
criticized the dirt on windows that cut off light 
(see Boston measurements of how much); the 
plants in the windows that did the same, and the 
seating of children in the darkest row of seats when 
there were vacant seats near the windows. He 
tested the vision of the children and found as we 
always find, a large percentage defective. When 
children enter school probably eighty out of 
every hundred have perfect eyes. Four years 
later only about sixty-five in a hundred have 
them, and four years later still fewer. It is 
mothers and fathers who allow dirty windows to 
blight their children for life. No one so surely as 
they can put an end to these wrongs. 

He found water-closets built in the middle of 
the house, with rooms around them; dimly 
lighted and with no sunshine; no heat to create 
currents of air for ventilating thru the top win- 
dows; deodorizers used instead of properly clean- 
ing the closets — the odor being evident thruout 



AND HEALTH 159 

the building. This is "a first class school" in the 
community. 

He found the common cup and towel (1910). 
The mouth contents on such cups have been 
already quoted from Professor Davison in dis- 
cussing "Clean Schoolhouses." Bacteriologists 
who have studied the common towel used in 
schools, factories, railway stations, etc. have 
found it as bad or worse; contaminated with 
fecal matter and bacteria from urine and bowel, 
with germs of trachoma and the gonococcus, both 
causing bUndness. Actual cases of blindness in 
school children and teachers have been traced to 
the school towel; and epidemics of "pink eye" 
have been due to its use. Nine states have taken 
action against the use of the common towel, it is 
stated in Public Health Bulletin No. 57, pubhsht 
August, 1912, by the direction of the Surgeon 
General; Connecticut, Massachusetts and Wis- 
consin by law; Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, 
Missouri, South CaroUna, and Washington by 
regulation of the State Board of Health. The 
Journal of The American Medical Association has 
recently (December 14, 1912) pubhsht a note 
that interstate quarantine regulations by the 
Treasury Department have just ordered the 
aboUtion of the common towel from railroad cars, 
steamers and other interstate vehicles and 
stations. It still remains for mothers to care as 



160 SCHOOL JANITORS 

much for their children in the very great majority 
of schools. 

The student found floors with wide cracks and 
very dirty. He found a janitor that swept 
corridors during school hours, filhng the whole 
building with fine dust, as do very many janitors. 
It ought to be made a legal offense on the part of 
the janitor, quite as much as is polluting public 
water supplies with sewage, or spitting on side- 
walks, and on the part of every principal who per- 
mits it. 

These conditions, some or all of them, reported 
by the student are found in every city and county 
in the country, probably with no exception, where 
there are schools. So negligent are we of chil- 
dren's health that many worse ones are to be foimd. 
That it is largely due to parental and public 
indifference is shown by the fact that many of the 
recommendations for greater cleanliness made as a 
result of the study were promptly carried out by 
the school authorities. 

Some of these that mothers also could probably 
secure when necessary are given (with my paren- 
theses), and the whole report is to be found in The 
Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1910. 

1. Trim the trees in and about the school 
yard. 

2. Put the stove at the bottom of the aspirat- 
ing chimney into condition for use, and 



AND HEALTH 161 

instruct the janitor to maintain a fire 
therein whenever artificial heating is in 
use. (Why not a fire whenever the rooms 
are in use?) 

3. Instruct the janitor and teachers to 
keep the outlet flues always open. 

4. Have the windows thoroly cleaned, and 
instruct the janitor to clean them as often 
as necessary. (The last three words are 
the weak point, as the Boston study 
proves.) 

5 and 6. Have intelligent management of 
shades, and allow no plants to reduce 
illumination harmfully. 

7. Seat children so as to secure the best 
light, and those with defective vision next 
windows, with myopic children in the front 
seats. 

9. Insist on proper cleaning of water-closets 
and urinals. 

10. Have artificial lights put in toilet rooms 
when natural light is not enough to ensure 
cleanhness. 

12. Install a bubble fountain and abolish 
the common drinking cup. (Have chil- 
dren make paper cups meanwhile.) 

13. Inexpensive individual drying cloths, 
such as are used in Pullman cars, instead of 
common towel. (There are also individual 
towels of paper, to bum after using, which 

11 



162 SCHOOL JANITORS 

are in some places cheaper than laundering 
towels.) 

14. Renovate floors by cleaning, scraping and 
crack-filling; then oil. (If possible use 
hnoleum as suggested in Clean School- 
houses.) 

15. Stop all sweeping while school is in 
session. Have entire building swept daily 
after the afternoon session, and dusted 
daily before the morning session. (Open 
windows during dusting, and finish it at 
least half an hour before school opens; an 
hour would be better.) Wash entire 
building every Saturday. (!!) 

So far, excellent. The trouble with rules and 
other good iutentions is that they so often fall 
to the ground and are said to make paving stones 
for another existence — usually in this world. 
Mothers should learn well the lesson taught both 
here and in Boston, as everywhere else, that 
official rules for housekeeping are not lived up to 
except under intelligent oversight. This city had 
previously a set of Janitor's Rules that required 
at least cleanliness, but did not secure it. It was 
an accidental university man that found it out — 
not the responsible mother, or father, of a pupil 
in the school. 



AND HEALTH 163 

May 

Dust again 

A janitor whose salary is larger than his princi- 
pal's, whose floors we let his own words describe 
further on, whose thermometers registered 74° 
and 82° when I read them and, according to the 
teachers, on many other occasions, argued at a 
meeting for discussion not long ago that it is right 
to clean floors while school is in session — "Why, 
every time a child walks across the floor the dust 
flies up. You can see it." 

The idea of this official caretaker of children is 
that you have to have dust anyway, and a little 
more or less is of no consequence — he choosing 
"more." We have agreed that this is the mis- 
fortune, not the fault of janitors. It is the fault 
of parents and others who provide no training 
schools, nor qualified supervisors, nor standards up 
to which they must work. 

What amount of dust is permissible cannot be 
determined by the number of sweepings — the 
politician's idea and the average man's. The 
housewife knows it depends on how thoroly the 
work is done. There are schools swept twice daily 
that even immediately after sweeping are not as 
dust free as others swept only twice a week. 

We have here the same problem as in study of 
other conditions of air fit for children and teachers 
to live in, such as temperature, humidity and air 
currents. We must have a standard of dustiness 



164 SCHOOL JANITORS 

and instruments of precision to measure it, to 
which janitors must conform, instead of conform- 
ing to guesses and opinions. The mayor of a 
small town whose schools had been pronounced 
dirty by a committee of gentlemen claimed: 
"That is a matter of opinion. A supersensitive 
person may think conditions untidy, unclean and 
therefore unsanitary, which an ordinarily sensi- 
tive person may consider as relatively tidy, clean 
and sanitary." He is quite right. Such a reply 
will always defend unstandardized conditions and 
always carry the "political machine" with the 
maker. 

One school committee proposes to solve the 
dust and dirt difficulty thru a committee of 
gentlemen who at unannounced times once a year 
with pencils and printed blanks shall inspect and 
record floors, walls, ceilings, windows, stoves, 
pipes, transoms, casings, desks, inkwells, black- 
boards, trimmings, wainscoting, supply lockers, 
cloakrooms, stairways, water-closets, lavatories, 
basements, general conditions, yard. Their find- 
ings are compared, the janitor markt, and dis- 
mist, promoted, warned or otherwise treated 
accordingly. He is given a copy of the report. 
Equally as important are other details of the 
school atmosphere under janitors' control; and 
the every day dust in between annual visitations 
that children have endured before the janitor 
is "called up." Callings up rarely reform — or 



AND HEALTH 165 

how easy to make the world over! The business 
manager also visits periodically; but he, too, is 
not trained in sanitation, nor housekeeping, nor 
child hygiene. 

The price of good housekeeping is daily and 
even hourly supervision, particularly where chil- 
dren are concerned. The best way to assure this 
frequent supervision and to keep certain vital 
details up to standards is to enUst the cooperation 
of children. Their help will also accompHsh 
some other needed results. 

Four years ago there were very few places, 
perhaps not five, but today there are more, where 
pupils are regularly enlisted to assist in school 
sanitation. Certain ones in the room are ap- 
pointed to read the thermometer at each hour, or 
at certain hours; to keep a formal record of the 
readings, possibly to make a chart from hour to 
hour or from day to day, either on paper for 
permanent records, or on the blackboard for the 
whole room to have in sight, or both. When 
arrangements permit, the reader turns on or off 
the heat, opens or shuts ventilators or windows. 
The appointments are changed from time to 
time, so that each child can have the educational 
experience of the work and of the responsibiUty. 
The method has various modifications; and it is 
invaluable as a means of interesting and instruct- 
ing our future home makers, of forming habits 
both of thought and of living that will persist. 



166 SCHOOL JANITORS 

Children as young as the fifth grade can learn 
"thermometer work" with a httle oversight, per- 
haps younger. But the standardizing of school- 
room humidity probably belongs in no grade under 
the sixth, unless as "helpers." It is entirely 
possible for eighth grade children to manipulate 
and read this hygrometer, if taught by one who 
knows, to compare it with the Weather Bureau's 
tables, and to record and chart the results. They 
can also learn to alter accordingly windows, or 
ventilators, or pails and tanks for evaporation. 
I have never seen this done, but am confident we 
shall never "arrive" in this detail of school hygiene 
and home hygiene until the children take hold. 

They can easily use anemometers for air cur- 
rents, and joss sticks or candles for currents too 
slight to be detected by the instrument. These 
would be less frequent duties, but ideal devices 
for efiFectively teaching sanitary standards. As 
schools at present are arranged, the "teacher of 
science" would usually be the leader of the work. 
Mothers must insist that normal classes prepare 
them to do it. As for the children, they are ready. 
They love to have a share in school responsibilities. 

In the last important detail, dustiness, an 
instrument or a method of precision and a standard 
are not so easy; or, rather, they that are have not 
yet been devised. The only methods of measur- 
ing dustiness that I have seen are more for the 
laboratory than for children in the schoolroom. 



AND HEALTH 167 

In schools where physics, or chemistry, or any 
biologic science has a laboratory, certain of these 
methods can easily become a part of pupils' work 
for the school. In the American Journal of Public 
Health, June, 1910, is publisht The Report of the 
Committee on Standard Methods for the Examina- 
tion of Air, signed by C.-E. A. Winslow, Ellen H. 
Richards, G. A. Soper, J. Bosley Thomas, John 
Weinzirl, and followed by numerous references to 
other studies. It gives the latest best methods, 
some of which may be of use to teachers. 

In elementary schools for the present I know 
of nothing better for measuring dustiness, and it is 
excellent, than that of a good housekeeper — a 
white or black cloth rubbed over surfaces to find 
what can be rubbed off. If dust can be, the good 
housewife considers the work poorly done, and it 
must be done over. In Clean Schoolhouses floors 
were mentioned that after certain methods of 
sweeping did not soil the white handkerchief 
past over them. 



June 

How to do it 

There is a very much better resource than 
questionnaires for supplying the background of 
information concerning what others are doing and 



168 SCHOOL JANITORS 

thinking which is needed to develop study of local 
conditions effectively. 

It is the Information Desk of the Public Library. 
It suggests an animated cyclopedia or, better, an 
animated switchboard, for the attendants in a few 
minutes connect one with the best that is written 
and all is thoroly up to date; health, school and 
other government reports; investigations by 
individuals and organizations; articles explaining 
and discussing almost any subject, scattered thru 
hundreds of periodicals that would take so much 
of one's own time to search out the task would be 
abandoned. It is an intellectual instead of an 
electric telephone service. The model Informa- 
tion Desk is in the Providence Public Library, 
under Miss Lyman, the successor of Miss Mabel 
Emerson — a pace-maker. 

When a Hbrary has no such department, the 
librarian and his assistants sometimes will help 
to material. Possibly the card catalogue or 
some supplementary catalogues group topics and 
references in such a way as to be useful. Where 
this fails in a community — thanks to Mr. Carnegie, 
50,000 fewer fail today than twenty-five years 
ago — and when a neighboring city library cannot 
be consulted, the publications by bureaus and 
departments of the Government at Washington 
can be had from the Government Printing Office — 
can be had for the asking on anything concerning 
the welfare of farm stock and crops and other such 



AND HEALTH 169 

interesting and valuable national assets; but to 
obtain information on health matters, one must 
buy the pamphlets. 

Every library should have the annual Reports 
of the United States Commissioner of Education 
which will be of use, and the various Indexes of 
Periodicals and of other publications where 
subjects and authors are arranged for convenient 
following up. Most of the references in this book 
also contain many others, putting the reader on 
the right track, especially the next reference 
given. 

No schedule of points and questions fits all 
places. The most helpful compilation of good 
questions and of good authorities to consult is 
probably by Dr. Guy Montrose Whipple of 
Cornell University, called Questions in School 
Hygiene, publisht by C. W. Bardeen, Syracuse, 
New York. Local and new questions can be ar- 
ranged satisfactorily by consulting this book in 
the public hbrary. 

It is better to have a short schedule directly 
to the point, than one of so many details as to 
appall volunteer helpers. Those having special 
acquaintance with local school housekeeping, 
perhaps a school nurse or teacher (even if an "ex"), 
can help decide the really essential questions. 

Possibly the shortest schedule would be : Name 
of school ; name of room ; date ; temperatures 
(as many as can be obtained) ; humidity (if it can 



170 SCHOOL JANITORS 

be had) ; cleanliness (windows, floors, corridors, 
basement) and dustiness; smells (rooms, corridors, 
water-closets, urinals); cup; towel; washbowls. 

One could hardly do less than this. One should 
do at least as much as this, and as much more as 
can be well done. On other pages other sugges- 
tions are to be found. 

One of the earliest steps forward to take, and 
as it usually appeals to teachers it is a compara- 
tively easy one, is to suggest the children's keep- 
ing systematic records of temperature as described 
on page 165. Altho the practice has grown among 
many schools during the last two or three years, 
there are hundreds of thousands of rooms that 
have not adopted it. 

Education by memorizing and reciting has had 
its day. The new times call for education by 
doing, if the human race is to retain its capacity 
for doing — which is life. Parasites — those who 
are done for — are quickly done for, whether men 
or women. School is a part of life, not " prepara- 
tion" only, and to practice pupils in standardiz- 
ing details affecting health means improving our 
vital statistics — the measure of a nation's right 
living. 

The charting of temperatures has many 
advantages. One is that more and more books, 
articles, reports and exhibits chart facts because 
it presents a more telling picture of the subject 
than mere words. Children will profit much 



AND HEALTH 171 

more from this new method who have grown to 
understand it easily by charting temperatures. 
The chart, especially if a standing feature of the 
blackboard, tells the hour's, day's, week's story to 
all in the room, janitor, principal, inspectors and, 
let us hope, to parents. It fights the battle for 
suitable temperature. 

Thermometers should be placed, for experiment, 
in different parts of the room to find whether they 
read the same, for often different heights and 
different walls vary several degrees. This inter- 
esting study leads to the pupils deciding on a 
"fair" place for all, which may be below a gas 
fixture or other point of suspension in the middle 
of the room. Let them work it out. 

A thermometer should be standardized, and the 
pupils should do it, perhaps every month. This 
is done by taking it to a place where there is an 
accurate thermometer, possibly a physical or 
chemical laboratory, or a good shop where instru- 
ments are sold or made, or to the local Weather 
Bureau. When the school thermometer does 
not read like the standard one, the pupil can learn 
the difference, perhaps one or two degrees, re- 
port it back to the school where the children will 
allow for it in the recording and charting. The 
accurate thermometer can be brought to the school 
and instruments in all the rooms standardized by 
it. Let the pupils do it. 

Paper fined into little squares can be bought for 



172 SCHOOL JANITORS 

making charts. Even better, the children can 
line plain paper vertically and horizontally, 
acquiring resourcefulness and accuracy by doing 
it. Pupils will make the blackboard charts them- 
selves — until someone patents blackboards for 
charting, like the children's paper cup, and school 
men buy them. A State Board (men) of an 
Industrial (reform) School for Girls illustrated the 
beautiful care they were taking of the girls by 
telling how they were planning to have all the 
bread making done in a regular bakery in the 
men's prison near by. "But — how will the girls 
learn to make it.?" protested the "lady visitors." 
We are having a strenuous hunt for wholesome 
outlets for energy, pitted against the forces con- 
straining it into factories — or idleness and mis- 
chief. 

After the chart is lined, write across the top 
above each square the hour when the reading is 
taken, perhaps 9 a.m., 10 a.m., 11 a.m. (there may 
be no need of reading it at noon if school is dis- 
mist), 1.30 p.m., etc. Down the sides opposite 
each square write the degrees from 90° perhaps to 
60°. I have never happened to find a school 
thermometer down to 60° in this country. In 
England the central Board of Education has 
establisht 60° as the temperature to be required 
in all schools. The Americans pleading for 68° 
hope, backt by the demonstrations of open air 
schools, for something lower still eventually. 



AND HEALTH 173 

I have frequently found school thermometers in 
the eighties. This will never be so when the 
custom we are urging is adopted; nor will it be so 
in private homes after school children have the 
right idea and the right habit. All this the women 
of the United States can bring to pass by 1915 — if 
they wish. Their responsibihty is as infinite as 
the immense waste of child hfe is infinite loss 
due to their negligence. Women might wisely 
wage a campaign on library temperatures, also, 
public, college, university — always above 70°, 
usually at 76°, often in the 80's. The moral is — 
don't put teachers in public schools with university 
and college methods. 

The charting of humidity also is necessary (see 
page 154) and can be done by children of the 
eighth and seventh grades, altho more oversight 
by the teacher may be called for. A mothers' 
club can loan or give to some or all rooms the 
necessary thermometers and this wet-dry bulb 
thermometer. The former are not expensive. 
The latter costs more (less than five dollars), 
and one will do for all the rooms in a building, 
being used by a handle, and not fixt to the wall. 
They are sometimes made to hang on the wall like 
a dry bulb thermometer, but for several reasons 
they have not proved reliable. They should 
hang in a strong draft if used. 

The use of anemometers by children, supplied 
by mothers, one for a building, is also desirable; 



174 SCHOOL JANITORS 

and the simple dust test can be used, but because 
rather commonplace is not hkely to be so appealing 
in a reform campaign. In this extremely impor- 
tant matter of dust unfranchised mothers can do 
Uttle compared with those in the free states. 

In the other details, the battle is almost won 
when the pupils keep the records. Therefore 
persuade the schools to this, tactfully, persistently, 
with every resource at command; and, when 
successful, follow up the innovation interestedly — 
just as with children at home — seeing that instru- 
ments are correct and replaced promptly when 
broken, and that records are preserved. 



DonHs 

Don't send questionnaires. 

The first great reason is because one learns very 
much more about school housecleaning by being 
on the spot. Questions and answers cannot cover 
all details, even when answers are accurate 
instead of "official, " or instead of being warped by 
passing thru another person's apperception. No 
one believes, for example, that the Alumnse would 
have received the facts they learned by personal 
observation if they had sent written questions of 
the kind they would have askt had they not 
seen for themselves. Many significant side 
details and side lights are obtained by first hand 
work that are important. 



AND HEALTH 175 

A second good reason for not sending question- 
naires is that people are pestered with them, and 
two-thirds, representing so much of the senders' 
money and time, are thrown in waste baskets. 
It would take more than one person's entire time, 
in some instances, to reply to all that are received, 
beside the labor of turning one's whole stock of 
information upside down and inside out searching 
for the answers. 

Questionnaires cannot in this particular case 
be accurate, any more than when the maid 
replies that she has cleaned the bathroom and 
one discovers on inspection that ideas of cleanli- 
ness differ. "Arm chair" school housecleaning, 
whether at the oflficial end or at the questionnaire 
end, such as most of it in this country has been, is 
vanishing with the old idea that women's organi- 
zations exist for their own pastime in communi- 
ties suffering for lack of their intelligent services. 

Don't announce what is going to be done. 
One's own expectations as well as the public's are 
liable to be chilled by disappointments. Work 
like this can be accomplisht very much more 
satisfactorily when things are found as they 
ordinarily are and not as when "expecting com- 
pany." 

Don't betray that "a chiel's amang you takin' 
notes." Keep pencil and blank out of sight. 
See as much as possible without asking questions, 
as when one goes to kitchen or nursery to learn 



176 SCHOOL JANITORS 

how the work or the children are progressing. 
Schools are pubhc nurseries for mothers' children, 
and a host of people are paid to keep them as safe 
as in the best kept homes — safer if possible. 

Don't wander off to related details — seating, 
window area, cubic feet of air and number of 
pupils, fields where so many are already consum- 
ing energy. Keep to the single great neglected 
department in schools — housekeeping — making 
things as they are as wholesome as they can be 
made for the children, as mothers are obliged to 
do in their homes. " SpeciaKze " in housekeeping. 
Model buildings as well as any other kind can be 
and they are discredited by bad care. 

Don't spend time on Don'ts. Suggest, urge 
if best, definite, correct, practicable ideas for 
making details better. Be sure they are practica- 
ble and correct. Officials, like children, need 
constructive management. 

And one more Don't : Don't exhaust energy on 
details that are "matters of opinion," as the mayor 
said, nor on details of any less consequence than 
the right air (temperature, dust, humidity, light, 
motion, open-air-ness) for children to live in, and 
'protection from fresh contagious material on cups, 
towels and other furnishings. Other housekeep- 
ing improvements can follow. 

First, gather some of the facts of temperature, 
humidity, air currents (by pupils' records if 



AND HEALTH 177 

possible), dirty floors and windows as compared 
with those in the home hbrary or kitchen, and any 
other facts belonging here that are facts — not 
guesses, nor hearsay. 

Second, have constructive suggestions for 
righting wrongs, some of which are to be found in 
these pages and their references. 

Third, after planning systematicly and doing 
what the mothers' club can by itself, appeal to 
^related groups and officials to cooperate, as did the 
Collegiate Alumnae. Appeal persistently and 
vigorously when necessary, thru personal inter- 
views, newspapers, organizations. Meet official 
delays, indifiFerence, false promises, incapacity, 
"playing politics," with steady strong pressure — 
stern if necessary. This is wholly a matter for 
righteous indignation when so treated by any 
agent of government. Have an official investigat- 
ing committee appointed if desired; but continue 
the original investigating even more vigorously — 
to keep them moving, and moving to hygienic 
conclusions rather than Democratic or Repubhcan 
or personal conclusions. 

Refuse all compromises that must be paid for 
by a child's life or injury. When mothers will 
not stand for the children, whom can we expect to 
do so? 

DO IT NOW — as the November placards say 
of Christmas shopping — for this year more than 
forty thousand children of elementary school 
12 



178 SCHOOL JANITORS 

ages (5 to 14) are dying, and millions more are 
being handicapt by ill health and physical 
defects. Very much more than half of all this 
can be prevented by our available knowledge, if 
mothers and fathers worthy to be trusted with a 
child's well-being really wish 

IF 

MOTHERS 

SAY SO 



IV 



PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF BIOLOGIC 
SCIENCE IN SCHOOL ADMINIS- 
TRATION: THE PROBLEM OF 
JANITOR SERVICE* 

(Author's Abstract) 

The factor in environment most completely 
under control of school authorities that most 
affects efficiency both in school and in later life 
is the schoolhouse air. 

The official who has direct and continuous 
charge of the air is the janitor. Its details with 
which janitors have to deal are dust, effluvia from 
bodies, temperature, and humidity. 

Dust is now recognized as a so universal cause 
of disease that the Bureau of the Census is intro- 
ducing a new classification, "occupational dis- 
eases," one used by England for a century and 
by other foreign countries over fifty years. Dust 
injures more by its irritating qualities than by 
the pathogenic organisms it contains. Inorganic 
dust, such as particles of metal, or stone, by irritat- 

*Read in the Department of Science Instruction and reprinted 
from Addresses and Pboceedings, National Education Associa- 
tion, Boston, Mass., July, 1910 

179 



180 PROBLEM OF 

ing the lining of nose, throat, bronchial tubes, 
and lungs, prepares these tissues for the pathologic 
action of micro-organisms; but micro-organisms 
of most communicable diseases are a form of 
delicate plant life easily destroyed by sunlight 
and drying. 

The death-rate from tuberculosis is highest 
among workers in metal, stone, pottery, and glass. 
It is lowest in the country, where one cubic inch 
of air is said to contain normally 2,000 dust 
particles, while in the city it contains 3,000,000 
made up of dried manure, sputum, house and shop 
sweepings, tobacco, ashes, smoke, iron, glass and 
stone particles, etc. 

Dust is the commonest cause of colds in the 
head, sore throat, bronchitis. Wind storms in 
cities are directly followed by increase of such 
practice among physicians; and the prevalence 
of catarrh, to some extent of sore eyes and adenoid 
conditions, is directly traceable to dust in streets, 
public conveyances and buildings. Pus microbes 
are practically always present in such dust. 

A nomenclature of dust diseases is growing. 
Pneumokoniosis is a disease of the lungs due to 
dust in general. Autopsies show that compara- 
tively few city dwellers are free from it. The lung 
tissue is dark in color, with fibrous thickening, and 
nodules where more or less active inflammatory 
changes took place. In life this was manifest 
by susceptibility to "colds," by debihty and 



JANITOR SERVICE 181 

lessened resistance to tuberculosis and pneumonia. 
Siderosis is due to minute particles of iron; 
anthracosis to coal dust; silicosis to sand. House 
dust has more pathogenic organisms because 
closer to invalids, and less open to fresh air and 
sunshine. 

There is a disease specially prevalent among 
those connected with public schools. But we are 
reluctant to admit that education has an occupa- 
tional disease. 

Dr. Oldright, professor of hygiene at the 
University of Toronto (see References), quotes 
statistics indicating that tuberculosis is the cause 
of death more often among teachers than among 
workers in all other fields together, i.e., the death- 
rate of teachers from tuberculosis is considerably 
above the average death-rate from tuberculosis; 
it is higher than in any other profession. This is 
in spite of the fact that women continue in teach- 
ing on an average only six years; men only nine; 
also that many resign before markt evidences 
of ill-health appear, and at the time of death may 
not be enumerated as teachers. 

Reports in medical literature of the last fifteen 
years show that between one-third and one-half 
of school children have tuberculosis, either active 
or liable to become so on sufficient irritation of the 
air passages or depression of general health from 
any cause. Frequency of tuberculosis gradually 
surpasses that of other diseases thru school and 



182 PROBLEM OF 

following years until in the prime of life it is the 
commonest cause of death. 

These data are based on many thousand 
autopsies where children died from diphtheria and 
other causes than tuberculosis (whose existence 
was not suspected), on X-ray and other delicate 
methods of examination, and on reaction to 
tuberculin tests. The fact that so many frail 
children improve in open air schools is suggestive. 

School fatigue and dullness are recognized 
accompaniments of the educational process; also 
nervous disorders. 

The best cure of all these ills is life in the open. 
The chief factor in school hfe that invites them is 
school sanitation. This we leave to ignorant and 
incompetent caretakers and supervisors; who 
make no pretense of fitting for sanitary inspection 
or sanitary duties ; who do the best they know with 
knowledge pickt up. 

It is certain that if in vocational or technical or 
continuation or trade schools were courses for 
janitors and their superintendents, inteUigent 
interest and efficiency would be secured and pubUc 
health improved. Every large city has several 
hundred janitors of schools, apartment houses, 
office buildings, theaters; as well as Pullman 
porters, train and street-car conductors, hotel 
managers. We need to introduce educational 
and health standards in this important occupa- 
tion. No good home maker has the dirty floors 



JANITOR SERVICE 183 

and atmosphere with which we shut up children 
and instructors. 

The Massachusetts Civil Service Commission 
examines applicants for janitors' places in personal 
record and elementary education, with a few 
questions on cleaning, heating, ventilating, and 
lighting. Engineers' hcenses are required for 
high-pressure engines except where "policemen's 
safety valves" are used. The test is much less 
rigorous than that for other offices, the reason 
given being that few eligible men apply. 

It is the custom to rely mainly on past service 
for promotion. Therefore the quaHty of a jani- 
tor's work depends much on the principal, as 
quaUty in domestic service has long depended on 
the mistress. The twentieth century is learning, 
and finds it hard to do so, that principalships, 
parenthood, and janitorships do not carry with 
them innate capacity for the duties; that men's 
and women's instincts as parents, principals, or 
janitors need twentieth-century scientific infor- 
mation for efficient care of children. 

They need understanding of biologic laws and 
their underlying principles in physics and chemis- 
try — subjects in which the great majority of 
parents, principals, and janitors are httle inter- 
ested, because in their schooHng teachers of these 
sciences made them academic rather than vital, 
or they had no such teachers. This Department 
of Science Instruction holds the key to school 



184 PROBLEM OF 

sanitation as to other problems of public health 
and morals. 

A teacher of biology in the ninth grade, whose 
every detail is directed to stamping pupils' minds 
with biologic laws common to daily life, whether 
studied in sea-weed or bird, and who has done it so 
wisely for eight years that now results are coming 
in from former pupils justifying departure from 
collegiate methods, said to me, "All I adapted to 
everyday problems I had to do myself. We do 
not get in our biology courses anything about 
human and social biology to fit these children for 
living." 

Fortunately this instructor had enough initia- 
tive to adjust "orthodox" training to these 
important demands; but this resourcefulness is 
not found as often as needed. If principals and 
others high up show little appreciation of biologic 
law in school management, and allow little time 
and equipment for biologic teaching and the 
necessary physics and chemistry, probably their 
experiences are like one of mine that is rather 
typical. After fifteen minutes in a classroom 
of thirty normal pupils vaguely discussing trap- 
door spiders and other "book animals," the 
principal justified the decision to cut down 
zoology one-third and give the time to English by 
saying, "It doesn't seem to amount to anything." 
The room had scores of flies; the neighborhood 
mosquitoes, tuberculosis, malaria, and infant 



JANITOR SERVICE 185 

mortality; but these fascinatingly related topics 
in civic zoology are commonly neglected. 

Some instructors in science create great interest 
by studying the immediate environment; and 
janitors who find "cultures" being made of halls, 
rooms, and basements (see References), tempera- 
tures charted day after day, and class discussions 
of conditions, possibilities, and methods, have 
become interested. Some such janitors are 
devising methods of floor-cleaning, dusting, and 
ventilating that are unique and of value. One 
instructor is contemplating a class for janitors 
this winter. 

We need school data concerning dust, air 
currents, temperature, humidity, and other details. 
Science instructors are ideally situated to secure 
them, and better work for educating pupils in 
sanitation could hardly be wisht. We need to 
establish permissible hmits which shall not be 
exceeded; to have practical methods for testing 
them; to have as definite standards of sanitation 
as of bookwork; to train caretakers as we train 
engineers, nurses, librarians. 

We have still lessons to learn from open air 
schools; and much between them and the elabor- 
ate, expensive systems at the other extreme, where 
air is sifted (the screens soon foul with dirt), or 
washt (the washings a muddy stream), heated, 
humidified, and sent at certain speed to rooms 
whose windows must not be opened, and where 



186 PROBLEM OF 

out of thirty-two automatic heat regulators I 
found twenty-seven that "didn't work." In 
about 600 schoolrooms in various cities I found 
210 thermometers, one-third of them out of order, 
and barely twenty registering within one of 70 
degrees, the others ranging from 72 degrees to 85 
degrees in winter months. Delicate children 
improve in all respects in outdoor schools where 
the temperature is that of even winter. Tubercu- 
losis is cured more rapidly in cold weather than in 
summer. England requires the schoolroom to be 
60 degrees. If this is too cold, it seems safer than 
ours in the seventies, with mortality statistics 
as they are. 

Health maxims cannot offset habits that edu- 
cate popular liking for overheating, and indiffer- 
ence to bad air and dust. 

In a Cornell student's recent report on a 
prominent school the hygrometer determined 
relative humidity 24 per cent, normal being 60; 
the anemometer found no currents in ventilating 
flues; the Pettersson-Palmqvist apparatus showed 
carbon dioxid steadily increasing from 4 parts in 
10,000 (normal) to 24 parts, i.e., the pupils 
breathed technically bad or very bad air thru the 
day.* The school, like all in that city, had printed 
rules for the janitor; but absence of technical 
training (janitor), technical standards (school 

* Determination of carbon dioxid is chiefly of use to indicate stag- 
nation of air. The dioxid ia never in suflScient quantities to poison. 



JANITOR SERVICE 187 

board), technical supervision (instructors) made 
rules valueless. 

Methods of precision are as practicable and as 
necessary for caretakers of a school as for nurses 
in a hospital; their routine practice is entirely 
possible with reasonable instruction, less instruc- 
tion than is given in schools for nurses and for 
domestic science. 



References : 

The Schoolroom as a Factor in Tuberculosis, 
Dr. William Oldright, Transactions of Second 
International Congress on School Hygiene, vol. 
II 

The School Child and Tuberculosis, Dr. H. F. 
Stoll, Transactions of the National Association 
for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, 
1910 

Annual Report of the Civil Service Commis- 
sion of Massachusetts, 1907-1908 

Educational Prevention, Emmeline Moore, 
Transactions of American Association for 
Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1910 

Our Short Course for Janitors, W. D. Frost, 
Addresses and Proceedings, National Educa- 
tion Association, 1910 



THE TRAINING OF JANITORS IN 

SANITARY CARE OF SCHOOL 

PREMISES* 



The Department of Science Instruction of the 
National Education Association during the recent 
meeting at Boston appointed a committee of 
three to report on suitable methods of securing 
sanitary care of school premises thru the training 
of janitors. An advisory committee of experts 
in sanitation is associated. 

Vital statistics of tuberculosis among teachers, 
and data from autopsies. X-ray and tuberculin 
tests concerning tuberculous lesions among chil- 
dren are ample reasons in themselves, if there were 
no others as unfortunately there are, for training 
competent caretakers of schools, where law com- 
pels children to congregate, and where the coun- 
try's health habits and health ideals are formed. 

Standards of school cleanUness should equal 

* Read before the Section of Municipal Health Ofl5cers, Milwaukee, 
September, 1910, and reprinted from Journal of the American Public 
Health Association, February, 1911. 

189 



190 TRAINING 

those of the best hospitals and private homes. 
The factor in school environment most completely 
under control of school authorities that most 
affects efficiency both at school and in future life 
is schoolhouse air. The official having direct 
and continuous charge of the air is the janitor 
who has to deal with details of dust, humidity, 
temperature and effluvia. This responsibihty is 
given to those who make no pretense of fitting 
for sanitary duties or inspection; who do the best 
they know how to do with pickt up knowledge. 

Teachers are usually expected to report neg- 
lected details to the principal who is nominally 
responsible for sanitary conditions. All good 
housekeepers know that such matters require 
persistent following up of the worker. Thus the 
teacher must "nag" the principal and "tell on" 
the janitor, both usually men with no train- 
ing beyond what unstandardized experience has 
given them. Teachers can hardly be blamed for 
neglecting this thankless task that creates hostihty 
and jeopardizes their positions while probably 
not securing the results desired. 

When janitors have the management of high 
pressure engines, engineer's licenses are required. 
A few cities have civil service examination for 
janitors, chiefly relating to their common educa- 
tion and previous experience. Massachusetts has 
civil service examinations that in sanitation are 
practically nominal, as few men eligible in other 



OF JANITORS 191 

respects apply, and there are no provisions for 
instruction in sanitary care of schools. In conse- 
quence the appointing of janitors from civil 
service lists is fallen in discredit among many 
school officials who find experienced janitors more 
satisfactory. 

The training and testing of caretakers of school 
premises is, however, as logical and imperative 
a need as is that of teachers, nurses, librarians, 
drug clerks; or of housekeepers, cooks, and other 
domestic workers, rapidly coming to pass. It is 
a vital factor in problems of school hygiene, 
and is likely to be the most effective means of 
educating other school officers in sanitation. 
Salaries paid janitors in large cities, ranging from 
$700 to $2,500 and $3,000, average higher than 
salaries of teachers, post-office employes, or assist- 
ant librarians, the formalities of whose appoint- 
ments are well known. 

Courses for janitors can be introduced in trade 
or technical schools, vocational or continuation 
schools. During the coming winter one or more 
biologists, possibly other science instructors also, 
and possibly one or more boards of health are 
planning experiments in talks, demonstrations, 
and other methods with classes of janitors. 

Studies of schoolhouse air show relative humid- 
ity often nearer 20% than the normal 40-70% ; 
temperatures are more often in the 70's and 80's 
than in the healthful 60's; carbon dioxid, indicat- 



192 TRAINING 

ing stagnant air, more often measures 20 parts in 
10,000, i. e., technically bad air, than the normal 
4 in 10,000; anemometers prove many ventilating 
flues out of order thru neglect. Dust, foul floprs 
and air, which are the rule, are what no good 
home maker or hospital official would tolerate. 

Meanwhile a very few schoolhouses, even in 
"soft coal cities," by no means the most expensive 
structures, have floors as clean as the home or 
hospital; a few others are practically free from 
dust; a few others have good air; a few school- 
rooms have temperature at 68 degrees or below, 
with red cheekt pupils and teachers, who become 
deprest and dull in warmer air when it accident- 
ally exists. 

Such schools and schoolrooms prove the possi- 
bility of achieving each of these results even in 
buildings that are not equipt with elaborate and 
expensive heating and ventilating apparatus that 
forbids opening windows and is frequently out of 
order. Open air schools are likewise demonstrat- 
ing the wholesome reaction of children to cool air 
of sufficient humidity and comparatively free 
from dust and smells. In them delicate children 
invariably make more rapid progress mentally as 
well as in health. 

Among the teachers of janitors it is desirable 
to include instructors from schools for nurses and 
domestic science, as the service required is 
technical and practical, to be held to definite 



OF JANITORS 193 

standards which thus far have been demonstrated 
in these two lines of education. In addition, 
health oflBcers, biologists, and instructors in 
physics and chemistry can be of service in creating 
standards and testing results. It is also import- 
ant to secure the cooperation of these men and 
women in estabhshing classes for janitors on a 
permanent basis in the right educational institu- 
tions. 

Every large city has several hundred janitors, 
not of schools alone, but of apartment houses, 
office buildings, theaters, churches and entertain- 
ment halls; also Pullman porters, train and street 
car conductors, hotel managers. With different 
grades of examination as in the United States 
postal service, this course can be adapted to each 
form of custodial care. 

We are seriously afflicted by insanitary pubUc 
buildings (including schools) and conveyances. 
The public good demands that educational and 
health standards be introduced in these important 
occupations that have been mentioned. 

It is a hopeful sign that the National Education 
Association has taken a so evidently practical first 
step in school hygiene. The cooperation of health 
officials will encourage further undertakings. 

In July, 1911, at San Francisco, a session is 

given to two topics: I. Assuming that schools 

should be not less wholesome than the best kept 

homes from which pupils are taken: What are 

13 



194 TRAINING 

permissible limits of variation in sanitary details 
that may be under teachers' advisement or con- 
trol (dust, temperature, odors, cleanUness, light, 
humidity, for example) ? How are such standards 
determined? How are such details to be con- 
veniently measured as heat is measured by a 
thermometer? II. By whom and how should 
janitors be trained and tested in sanitary care of 
school premises ? 



INDEX 



Adenoid conditions, 12, 97, 

180 
Air, at home, 12-20, 121 
"blanket," 151-2 
city and country, 12, 67- 

8, 98, 180, 129, 132 
currents, 132, 144, 147. 

See Anemometer 
motion, 14, 152-4 
open. See Open air 
parcht (very dry), 13, 

155 
school, 13, 21-7, 28, 32, 
61, 96, 117, 121, 176, 
179, 191-2 
sifted and washt, 101, 

185 
See Dust, Humidity, 
School, Temperature, 
Ventilation 
American Association for 
Study and Prevention of 
Infant Mortality, 68, 187 
American Medical Associa- 
tion, Journal of, 159 
American Public Health As- 
sociation, Journal of, 68, 
167, 189 
Anemometer, 140, 145-6, 166, 

173 
Aspirating chimney. See 

Ventilation 
Association of Collegiate Al- 
umna;, 122-141, 158, 162, 
174, 177 
Autopsies. See Dust 



Babies, 15. 83. See Infant 
mortality 

Bailey, Prof. L. H., 45 

Basements, 19, 23-26, 68, 77, 
108 

Baths (internal cleanliness), 
51 
kinds of, 28-32, 103 
tonic, 28-30, 42, 149 

Biologic science, 41, 59, 179- 
187 

Boston. See Association Col- 
legiate Alumnse 

Boston Health - Education 
League, 55 

Breakfast, 42-3 

Brookline Public Baths, 31 



Carbon dioxid, 147-8, 186 
Carriers, 79, 80, 81 
Catarrh, 12. See Colds, Dust, 

Tuberculosis 
Ceilings. See Walls 
Chapin, Dr. C. V., 80, 81 
Charting, 128, 165-6, 170-3, 

185 
Chicago, mother's letter, 96, 
101 
United Charities, 94 
Churches, 105, 108 
Cigarettes, 54-5 
Civil service, 26, 115, 183, 190 
Clothing, dirty, 21, 27-30. 

See Dress 



195 



196 



INDEX 



Colds, 15, 16, 19, 180. See 
Dust, Temperature, Tu- 
berculosis 
Colleges and universities, 48, 

50, 63, 143, 173, 184 
Competition in play, 51 
Compromises, 177 
Compulsory school attend- 
ance, 11, 62, 87, 131, 144, 
189 
Conductors, street car, rail- 
way, 182, 193 
Constipation, 37-42 
Contagions. See Dust, School, 

Tuberculosis 
Cornell student's survey, 

143-162, 186-7 
Cost of cleanliness, 22, 70, 
96, 102, 134 
of janitors' work, 114 
of school plant, 98, 104- 
5 
Coughing, 49, 156-7 
Cup, the common, 79-85, 
112-3, 157, 159, 176 
paper, 82-5, 161, 172 



Dancing, 41, 51 

Davison, Prof. Alvin, 81, 113, 

159 
Dentists, 34-6 
Disease germs. See Cup, 

Dust, Towel 
Disinfectants, 23, 73, 77, 126- 

7, 139 
Domestic science. See Home 

economics 
Don'ts, 174-6 
Dress, 53, 55-8 
Dust, bronchitis and catarrh, 
composition and prev- 
alence, 67-8, 97, 
180 
committee on, 164 



Dust, contagions and 
"germs," 13, 68, 80- 
2, 139, 148-9, 159, 
176, 180 
data needed, 185 
diseases, 179-81 
feather dusters, 23, 25, 

84 
lungs (autopsies), 97, 

133, 180 
measuring and stand- 
ardizing, 163, 166-7 
pupils' co-operation, 

165, 170, 174 
removal of, 21, 23, 70, 

71-4, 89, 160, 162 
street, 96-101, 103 
See also Floors, Walls, 
Windows 



Ears. See Fatigue, Streets, 
Teeth 

Engineer's license, 183, 190 

England, 31, 35, 44, 47, 119, 
133, 179, 186 

Excursioning, 52, 59 

Exercise. See Excursioning, 
Gymnastics, Play, Vaca- 
tion 

Exhibits, 141 

Eyes, 50, 88, 91-2, 131, 152, 
158-9, 161. See Nervous 
system. Photometer 



Fathers, 59, 62-3, 78, 81, 87, 
111, 130, 138, 158, 178. 
See also Parents, Politi- 
cians 

Feet. See Dust, Shoes, Ner- 
vous system 

Floors, 16, 21, 22-4, 62, 67- 
77, 86, 125, 126-7, 139-40, 
160. 162-3 



INDEX 



197 



Food, 11. See Breakfast, 
Constipation, Lunches, 
Teeth 

Formaldehyde. See Disin- 
fectants 

Frost. Prof. W. D., 187 

Furnace, fresh air supply, 
16-7, 20, 25-6, 96, 100-1 

Furnishings, 16-7, 21, 96, 
107, 127 



Gaines, Prof. Elizabeth, 83 
Games, 41, 51, 86 
Gardening, 24, 41, 52, 53, 59, 

76, 98, 133, 155-6 
Gas, from chimneys, 102, 129, 

144 

light, 92, 129-30. 
See Carbon dioxid 
Gerhard, W. Paul, 31 
Gray, H. S., 55 
Gymnastics, 31, 48-52, 69 



Habits. See Cigarettes, Con- 
stipation, Open air. Teeth, 
Sanitation 

Hands, cleanliness, 79, 107 

Hanger, G. W. W., 31 

Hill, Dr. Leonard, "Stuffy 
Rooms," 153 

Home economics, 27, 41, 44, 
46-7, 63, 192-3 

Home, the 20th century, 137- 
9 

Housekeeping. 22, 27, 61, 85, 
96, 103, 114, 123-4, 139, 
145, 165. 176, 190 

Humidity, 13, 15, 151, 154-5, 
166, 173, 186, 190 

Hunt, Caroline L., 45, 46 

Hygrometer. See Humidity 



Idleness, 53-4, 58 
Infant mortality, 117-122, 
124, 139, 185 

Janitors and air, 122, 144 

and biologic science, 

179-187 
and examinations, 

26, 183, 193. 194 
and health, 111-178 
and methods, 72-5, 

100, 160. 185 
and politics. See 

Fathers, Pohti- 

cians 
and promotion, 183 
and rules, 124-7, 142 

162, 186 

and salaries, 27, 65, 
114, 115-6, 191 

and supervision, 27, 
66, 75, 162, 165, 
182, 187 

and training schools, 

27, 114-5, 182-3, 
185-7, 189, 191-3 

untrained, 62-3, 114, 

163, 182, 190 
Johns Hopkins Medical 

School Children's Hospital, 
77 



Kerosene, 72, 78, 90, 139 
Key-word, ix, 25, 170 
Kmdergartens, 27, 86, 126 
Kipling, Rudyard, 53 

Lavatories (Urinals, Water- 
closets), 23, 77-80, 87, 149, 
158 

Laws, 20, 57, 83, 102-3, 112, 
125, 131, 133, 138, 183-4, 
189 



198 



INDEX 



Legal responsibility, 74, 79, 
92, 127, 144-5, 160 

Libraries, 32, 45, 46, 68, 80, 
81, 109, 148, 168, 173 

Light. See Eyes, Photom- 
eter, Walls, Windows 

Linoleum, 70-7, 86, 162 

Lunches, 35, 43-7, 77 

Lungs, 50. See Dust, Con- 
stipation, Gymnastics, 
Swimming 



McKeever, Prof. Wm. A., 55 
Michigan, Board of Health, 

136 
Mothers, 12, 19, 22, 30, 39, 
59, 62, 101, 111, 137-9, 
145, 159-60 
Mothers' clubs and anemom- 
eters, 146, 166 
clubs and baths and 
swimming pools, 
30-2 
clubs and boards of 
education, 24, 83, 
114 
clubs and clean 
schoolhouses, 61- 
109, 113, 141 
clubs and curricu- 
lum, 41 
clubs and dentists, 

35-6 
clubs and floors, 69 

-77 
clubs and home 
economics, 44, 47 
clubs and janitor's 

classes, 27 
clubs and lunches, 

42-7, 77 
clubs and neglect, 
24, 81, 111-4, 
136, 141, 158, 160 



Mothers' clubs and open air 
and overheating, 
20,22,26,50, 95, 
148 

clubs and programs, 
20, 36, 45, 94, 99, 
113, 141, 143, 
167-74, 176-8 

clubs and Pedagogi- 
cal Seminary, 46 

clubs and responsi- 
biUty, 66, 92, 95, 
119-20, 145 

clubs and school 
yards, 102 

clubs and social 
centers, 108 

clubs and streets, 
99-100 

clubs and tubercu- 
losis, 136-7. See 
Tuberculosis 

clubs and vacation 

schools and play, 

58-9. See Play 

Muscular system, 57, 91. 

See Gymnastics 



National Education Associa- 
tion, 61, 148, 179, 183, 189, 
193 

Nervous system, 12, 15, 19, 
28, 33, 37, 50, 57-8, 62, 88, 
91, 121, 131, 152, 182 

New York School Hygiene 
Association, 83 

Normal schools, 23-4, 66, 112, 
166, 184 

Nurses, 15, 27, 36, 63, 114, 192 



Odors, 13, 20, 22-4, 30, 49, 
62, 72, 75, 78, 106- 
7, 147, 158 



INDEX 



199 



Odors. See Baths, Clothing, 
Gas, Teeth, VentU- 
ation 
Official cooperation, 122 

committee, 141, 164, 

177 
ignorance, 63, 114, 
135, 137, 142, 144, 
165 
management, 51, 92, 
101, 104, 124, 132, 
146, 176, 184 
Oldright, Dr. William, 181, 

187 
Open air, 12, 14, 26, 51, 59, 
65, 153 
pollution, 133 
schools, 21, 76, 93- 
5, 116, 147, 172, 
182, 185, 192 
sleeping, 17-9 
Osborne, Lucy A., 45 



Packard, Dr. Mary S., 93 
Parents, 11, 50-3, 54, 71, 121, 

127, 142, 162, 171, 183. 

See Fathers, Mothers, 

Mothers' clubs 
Pasteur, 90 

Pedagogical Seminary, 45, 160 
Pennsylvania Board of 

Health, 141 
Phagocytes, 149 
Photometer, 128-34, 158 
Play, 11. 41, 59, 108; 24, 51, 

68, 102, 140, 143 
Poisons and toxins, 33, 37, 51, 

80, 97, 112-45 
Politics, 11-12, 22, 63-4, 78, 

82, 92, 99, 103, 105-7, 114, 

134-6, 163-4, 177 
Principals, 55. 145, 160, 171, 

183, 190 



Providence, 93, 168 
Pullmans, 150, 182 



Questionnaires, 167, 174-5 



"Race suicide," 11, 62, 118- 

22, 127 
Reproductive system, 40, 50 
Richards, Mrs. Ellen H., 122, 

123, 167 



Sanitation, specialists in, 27, 
61, 84, 189 
pupils' coopera- 
tion in, 165-7, 
170-4 
standards, 143, 
182, 186-7, 190, 
192-3, 194 
schedules and sur- 
veys in, 22, 
122-41, 142-62, 
169-70, 176-7. 
191-2 
School boards, 12, 21, 24, 51- 
2, 63, 66, 71, 82, 83, 
122, 160, 186 
diseases, 11, 62, 108, 

116, 121, 181 
expenses, 22, 70, 102, 
104-5, 114, 123-4, 
134 146 
fatigue, 11-59, 61, 65, 
86, 91, 111, 131, 
152, 182 
gardens and yards, 24, 

41, 76, 98, 101-2 
house-cleaning, 27.61- 

109, 124-7. 192 
in suburbs, 24, 76, 98, 
102 



200 



INDEX 



School janitors, 26-7, 111- 
178, 179-87, 189- 
94 
nurses and physicians, 
13, 27 34-6, 94, 142 
recesses, 24 
visiting, 22. 24, 25, 53 
continuation, voca- 
tional, etc., 63, 105, 
182, 191 
See Dentists, Social 
centers. Teachers, 
Ventilation 
Science teachers, 166, 179, 

185, 189, 193 
Shoes, 21, 56-8, 86, 96, 100 
Skin, 149, 151. See Baths 
Sleep, 11, 12, 28, 29, 54. 

See Open air 
Smoke, 55, 96, 101-3, 129, 
130, 132-3. See Cigarettes 
Social centers, 104-9 
Standardizing, 115, 125, 129, 
142, 163, 170, 171, 182, 
185, 193-4 
Stone, Dr. Ellen A., 93 
Street dust and noise, 23, 49, 

96-100. See Dust 
Superintendents, 26, 84, 98 
Sturgeon-General, 159 
Swimming, 31, 32, 41, 52, 59 
Systems, 25, 26, 49, 55, 101, 
129, 144, 146, 154 



Teachers, 13, 24, 27, 36, 49, 
59, 66, 71, 74, 82, 88, 107, 
112, 115-6, 127, 190. See 
Science teachers, Tubercu- 
losis 

Teeth, 32-6. See also Odors, 
Ventilation 

Temperatiu-e, at home, 13, 
121, 173 



Temperature, at school, 96, 
117, 128-9. 
148-50, 173. 
186 
by feelings or 
t h e r m o m- 
eters,15,128, 
171-2 
pupils' cooper- 
ation, 165- 
6, 170, 173, 
185 
Thermometers, wet-dry bulb, 
See Humidity. 
See Mothers' clubs. Tem- 
perature 
Thermostats, 128, 186 
Towels, 78, 79, 159, 161, 176 
Tuberculosis, children, 21, 33, 
64-5, 78, 98, 
181, 189 
school disease, 
78, 86, 108, 
116, 121, 129, 
155-6, 181-2 
teachers, 21, 64, 

98, 136, 189 
See Colds, 
Dust, Open 
air 
Typhoid, 78, 79, See Towels 



U. S. Bureau of Census, 21, 22, 
25,114,115, 
119, 120, 
135, 136, 
139. 142, 
179 
Education, 45, 
79,111,169 
Labor, 31 
Mines. 103 
Government Printing 
Office, 31, 168 



INDEX 



201 



U. S. Weather Bureau, 154- 
5, 171 



Vacuum cleaning, 75, 140 
Ventilation, 14, 21, 23 

aspirating chim- 
neys, 144, 145, 
160 

systems, 25, 101, 
132, 140. 146 

See Anemome- 
ters, Tempera- 
ture, Windows 



Walls, 16-7, 21, 85-90, 132 
Whipple, Dr. Guy M., 169 
Wilson, H. M.. 103 



Windows, 16, 17, 25, 90-2, 
102, 128-34, 146, 154, 158, 
161, 185 
Winslow, Prof. C.-E. A.. 68, 

148, 157, 167 
Women cleaning school 
houses, 23 
enfranchised, 66. 88, 

119-20, 145, 174 
guilty, 87, 111 
training for house- 
keeping, 63 
on school boards, 21 
responsibility, 95, 

136, 173, 175 
school inspectors and 

supervisors, 27 
See Mothers' clubs 
Woodbridge, Prof. S. Homer, 
123 



MAR IS 1913 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



029 463 844 1 



